Student health and wellbeing
This article discusses the merits of using cancer as a context for teaching about social and ethical issues. It is based on part of a larger research project that investigated the teaching and learning of social and ethical issues in a Year 13 biology class.
Road safety education for young children requires more than games, rhymes, and worksheets; it needs to be linked to everyday experiences of traffic and addressed "little and often". This article reports on the experiences of teachers and classes in the first years of school who participated in a national project to develop integrative cross-curricular, essential-skills-based road safety education.
This New Zealand study proposes that the ethos and culture of schools can be a major protective factor in helping children to cope with violent and traumatic events. Implications for teachers are discussed.
Any student can become a target of physical, verbal, or relational bullying, but now there's a new threat—bullying through text-messaging. This article examines the nature and prevalence of text-bullying, and how it relates to other forms of bullying.
This article describes a pilot behaviour intervention programme for boys aged 7–9 with severe, challenging behaviours. The pilot was based on the Canadian SNAP™ (Stop Now and Plan) programme and developed jointly by the Ministry of Education/Special Education and primary and secondary RTLBs.
With the threat of Avian Influenza, a new emphasis is needed on the provision of hand-hygiene facilities and food-safety education in schools. This timely article discusses the results of a survey of 175 randomly selected New Zealand early childhood education centres and primary, intermediate, and secondary schools.
How do students from minority groups develop effective literacy skills? The perceptions of two groups of Pasifika students—one achieving and one underachieving in literacy learning—are compared. They identify pedagogical practices and family or community factors as influential on their literacy learning.
New Zealand’s first secondary school nurture group, at Linwood College, is discussed with reference to Students First (a theme of the Secondary Futures project). Learning is organised around students’ needs rather than year level, drawing on principles that can be translated to a regular classroom environment.
Contemporary understandings about health education underpin one school's response to student and community need by ensuring consistency across the school system and using external providers to enhance this synergy. Supporting student action to improve health and wellbeing can assist schools to meet the intent of the new curriculum.
