Book 7 of Life Skills for the Young Dakota is designed for seventh graders as a comprehensive and culturally sensitive educational tool to continue this systematic approach of health and healing.
This curriculum addresses many crucial aspects of adolescent development while incorporating traditional Dakota values and practices so that they have the tools to make healthy choices. It builds resilience and self-esteem while also teaching practical life skills for our young people to thrive.
– Students learn all about the changes that youth go through in the adolescent stages of life.
– Continued education on how to break the cycle of addiction.
– Learning how to choose life over death; how to respond to bullying; tools for depression; tools to build healthy self-esteem; and learning to see the sacredness of life.
– Strengthen Dakota identity through cultural preservation and language.
– Empowerment with emphasis on self-esteem, decision-making, and learning to take responsibility of one’s choices.
– Promote healthy life choices
– Whole-body medicine wheel approach, viewing each of us in four parts; the physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental aspects of ourselves that we refer to as “bodies.”
– Helping the child to understand that each “body” is equality important to educate, nurture and develop in order to be able to walk a balanced life.
Physical health: Our relationship to Mother Earth & nutrition, sleep, hygiene, exercise, water, disease prevention, how drugs/alcohol affect our body, seeing life’s big picture.
Emotional health: identifying and expressing feelings, dealing with trauma and anger, boundaries for healthy relationships, grief, self-talk, depression, choosing a healthy partner.
Spiritual health: culture is a gift, gratitude, how addiction affects our spiritual body, the importance of a spiritual path; the gift of life, and how our attitudes affect our life.
Mental health: identifying our dreams and setting goals, all choices have consequences, dealing with prejudices, a closer look at bullying, meeting and connecting with new people, resolving conflicts, drama and the power of words, codependency, depression/suicide.
The students will go around the medicine wheel 14 times (7 times for the first semester and 7 times for the second semester.)
o Opens with Health & Wellness Practices (meditation, tapping, talking circles, journaling) to take the child from a stress/trauma brain to a learning/creative brain.
o Read aloud by students and teachers with interactive activities for each lesson.
o Incorporates Dakota language words and ancestral wisdom.
o All workbooks have a pre and post inventory survey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HVYX8FT) to track the learnings of our children and to see how this curriculum is impacting their thoughts, behaviors, actions and beliefs. Teachers are encouraged to take pre surveys the first week of school and post surveys the last week of school. If at home take the “inventory” at the start and at the end.
*Teacher’s Manual – check out to see what these include. It is designed so any teacher can teach it.
