Author: Mary Jane Little
Planning Unit: Animal and Food Sciences
Major Program: 4-H Health Core Curriculum
Plan of Work: Beneficial Lifestyle Choices
Outcome: Intermediate Outcome
The GEM curriculum (Get Experience in Mindfulness) is national 4-H curriculum that provides tools for educators to enable students with stress and coping mechanisms. Mason County 4-H hosted a 6 week program at St. Patrick's school for 7th and 8th graders. The lessons entail stress recognition and management, anxiety recognition and grounding techniques, how to identify stress triggers, and personality tests to get to know how others may experience stress. Students worked through individual and group activities to gain knowledge and experience in handling stress. The techniques learned will resonate with them and be able to refer back to at a later date. Outcomes shown through this program were that 100% of students could recognize stress, and learned at least one new coping mechanism at the end of the series. Students were able to identify their stressors and verbally express at least one way to decrease stress from their stressor. The principal, counselor, and teachers of classes were involved and gave positive feedback to the program.