Skaha Lake Middle School counsellor, Louise Ganton, identified a subject matter that her students perceived as a significant barrier to their happiness and success – anxiety. In response, she included anxiety modules in her new Healthy Living Course, mandatory for grade eight students. She worked with Anxiety Canada to develop modules that focus on teaching anxiety management strategies, so students learn to manage their own anxiety at school and at home.
Registered clinical counsellor, Liliana Cortes, was hired to develop the unit plan and modules that had direct links to the anxiety resources at anxietycanada.com and the free MindShift App. Anxiety Canada is pleased to have helped support the creation of these anxiety modules.
Two hundred and twenty students in grades six and eight directly benefitted from this course. The open sourced modules of the Health Living Course will be shared with several schools in the South Okanagan region to expand the reach of Healthy Living and will be available to school counsellors and educators for many years to come.
As part of the program, the grade eight class also developed promotional videos to demonstrate how easy it is for youth to use Anxiety Canada’s MindShift App to help them cope with anxiety. You can check out the MindShift videos that Skaha Lake Middle School created on the Anxiety Canada YouTube page. A special thanks to Louise Ganton and the students at Skaha Lake Middle School.