Þjósarskóli decided to have a theme week inside the school year of the school hear 2011-2012. It was divided into 8 different school weeks all with the theme of health for children. This was done as a health initiative for the children to empower them in different fields. This needed good collaboration between school officials, teachers, students, parents, and others adult that are involved in the upbringing of the student.
The 8 different fields focused on are:
food, teeth cleaning, their home, mental health, local community, exercise, safety, and lifestyle.
They implanted ideas from the staff that they thought would keep the attention of the children to these subjects with out preaching over them what and how they should do this. This gives children the freedom of expression and involvement they felt they needed to take in.
I will focus on the food related exercises they did in one of the theme weeks which was first showing them educational videos made by the Icelandic government which were very brief and then divided the students into pairs, one from the senior classes and one from the younger classes. Then the pairs were divided into 4 groups to work on a exercise about the food cycle. They made a large food cycle and drew each nutritional category, cut it out and glued it into the large food cycle. While this was happening, the teacher walked between students and explained to them why each category was important and why healthy food was important in general. They also talked in this session about teeth cleaning is important to connect with the nutrition categories and how the affect the teeth.
Needs collaboration between large groups, this method worked for this group kids, but the teachers had knowledge of what might work with them, need for schools to have the room to go outside the normal scheduled classroom activities.
