Mitey is an initiative to support students mental and emotional health through discussing emotions, relating to their peers and learning ways to deal with how they feel in different situations. In Team 1B we have been exploring Mitey through our students’ interests, books and promoting positive interactions with one another.
In Mitey we use a range of activities and games to share experiences, act out scenarios and build our confidence when sharing our feelings. In Team 1B we have been doing activities that involve everyone!
A great activity is standing in a circle and stepping in when they agree with the question that gets called out. This is a fantastic activity which allows students to share their opinion and relate to their classmates. The questions ranged from “Do you think cats are better than dogs?” to “have you ever felt sad?”. By mixing the questions from easy light-hearted questions to questions about different emotions, it allows the students to get more comfortable and encourages them to join in.
Another activity we use in Team 1B is Freeze Frames to highlight different emotions in different scenarios such as when they had to say a speech in front of everyone by themselves. Emotions are a hard topic to discuss, and it can be hard to target the emotion you are really feeling so this initiative supports learners in developing their strategies when having different feelings. Room 8 has made their own emotion cards to use as a reference and display when doing Mitey which is a fantastic tool to support learning conversations.
Mitey can also be used in most curriculum areas such as our Literacy though big books and poems, Writing, Maori and Social Sciences.
Team 1B love learning about Mitey so please feel free to ask your learner about it and find out more things they have been doing in their classes to support their emotional and mental health.
