Poetry for PSHE

Healthy living is not a topic title that garners much excitement.

Yet when teachers start talking about ‘life’, the big scary world of being an adult, children get interested. With this in mind, I set about designing a unit that was relevant to the adult world my class of Year 6’s would be entering in their not too distant futures. Talking about healthy eating? It’s important, but so is talking about the impact of consuming social media. Discussing exercise? Maybe, but should we not also talk about exercising choice, giving consent and recognising when we are being influenced?

The Lessons

Mental health was our first focus. Poor mental health is the biggest killer of men aged under 25 in the UK, and yet talking about emotional and mental health is a subject still often discussed in hushed tones around children. We discussed our ‘comfortable’ and ‘uncomfortable’ emotions in class, recognizing no emotion is good or bad, they all serve a purpose and are part of our response to the world around us.

We examined social media and its effect on the brain; how each little ‘like’ on a post gives us a tiny dopamine rush. How each love heart on an Instagram post makes us feel noticed, yet is a false sense of intimacy with another person.

In this age when image is everything and the selfie is king, we had a long look at body image and what advertisers sell as normal. If you want to see just what can be done with Photoshop, Google “photoshop pizza slice to model”. You’ll discover just how a slice of pepperoni pizza can be transformed into a curvaceous swimsuit model. When we started looking critically at adverts it soon became apparent just how much gets altered. An odd wrinkle smoother here; an eye colour altered there – or a knee bent back on itself and an extra hand added!

Relationships and sex education are a set of lessons that bring up lots of ‘uncomfortable’ emotions for teachers. Yet as adults, our relationships are our biggest source of happiness or misery. No more would it be ‘Sex after SATs’, instead it’s time a week was given just to talk about relationships.

What is a healthy relationship? What is the difference between a friendship and a romantic relationship? What is consent and why is it just like making someone a cup of tea? Sexual relationships today can involve the sending of explicit images, but what happens if you send an image? Can you control who then sees the image and where it goes? As my class looked more at how to live a healthy life, we generated more questions than answers and some time for introspection and reflection was needed.

In Action

If you put Rudyard Kipling and Healthy Living in a sentence together, images of Boy Scouts and getting some fresh air is what most readily springs to mind. However, it was his poem IF– that drew our focus. Written as a letter to his son, the poem outlines Kipling’s view of what it meant to be a man and live a good life in the Victorian age. The poem speaks of forgiveness for yourself and for the failings of others; of how to meet ‘Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same’; of resilience and of not dwelling on past failings. In our age of celebrity and selfies, the theme of humility, of not losing ‘the common touch’, resonated with the class.

With this structure in mind, we set about writing our own IF–. What are the IFs of being a man or a woman today? What is the mindset needed to live an emotionally healthy life? Ideas were discussed and words flowed in our English lessons. Themes of compassion, humility, resilience and courage in your own convictions.

We built the poems as a series of photos; a collection of separate ideas that were then collected into themed verses. Of the hundreds of lines that were written, here is a selection, and I believe Kipling would have approved:

• ‘IF you can be kind when kindness is not earned.’

• ‘IF the truth doesn’t always show, then make it so people do know.’

• ‘IF you are always there for your friends and family, always chose them over life’s luxuries.’

• ‘WHEN you can train like you’re second, yet believe it not too much.’

• ‘IF you can be attentive, without expecting attention back.’

One of those lines is from a low prior attainment pupil. Poetry is about ideas, not rules, and in writing this and other poems, even those who struggle with writing are able to convey complex ideas. “Writing poems just lets you get on with the job without the fluffy bits,” as one pupil succinctly put it.

Conclusions

As Virginia Woolf so eloquently stated, through writing we can grabble with the big ideas of life. Writing gives the space to play with ideas, to put them into the world and then cross them out again. I see this each week in the Writers’ Club I run at school as I and 50 children gather to share ideas and words. We discuss how words help us define our world and how our definitions help us understand it. The children create and publish writing that shows the magic of the world; how happiness can be found in the small details.

And, when it comes to living a healthy life, finding a little happiness is a good place to start.

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This article was originally published in HWRK Magazine. You can read the latest edition of their excellent magaze here.