Happy November!

As we move into a new month here at Kennedy we also moved into a new unit of YESS classes. We finished up our main section on identity, although it will continue to be a part of our discussions and moved into our unit on healthy relationships.

Last week we began discussing how healthy relationships look. Students thught about relationships on a broad spectrum, romantic, friendships, families, and even those to our envoronment. In their small groups they looked at signs of healthy relationships and then defined them for the board you can see above. In addition to defining these traits students thought about and included what SEL skills they though a person needed to build healthy relationships. As you can see trust stood out to many as a critical component of healthy relationships and many noted that self-awareness and responsible decision making were necessary SEL skills.

Special shout out to 9th grade student Kenzie for taking the lead on her group's healthy relationship traits page and to 12th grade student Ashton Robles for always taking on whatever needs to be done and for putting together our lovely board!

As November goes on we will continue to discuss healthy relationships, but we could not acknowledge the beginning of the month without also acknowledging the beginning of Native American/Indigenous Heritage Month. Monday of this week we discussed the importance of thinking about indigenous communities today and not simply thinking of them as something from the past. One way we thought through this was by watching the video below on teen activists using social media to support and highlight thier cultures and history.

Students also did a small research project on Indigenous activists and figures. Please see their work below. As with so much of our work this topic is not one and done, we will continue to have these conversations and to emphasize it's importance.

Next week we will be talking about speres of influence and healthy relationships to ourselves. I continue to be so impressed with these students and cannot wait to see how they engage with these topics.