Find your Happy Place...

Categories: s1 and s2

On the radio this morning, I heard the news that Edinburgh is apparently the most miserable place in Britain (Glasgow was sixth from bottom),and wondered what made people think of a place as miserable or cheerful. I decided to do an exercise with s1 second period. We started off with the usual 'how are you's' etc and I started digging a bit deeper-'But, how are you on a scale of 1 to ten?' and so on. I then told the class about what I'd heard on the journey to work and showed them ten pictures of places. The places were the top and bottom 5 from the list. I asked them to work in groups to rate them from happiest to most miserable. The results were not anywhere close to the survey.

I then asked the class to take 5 minutes in the same groups to brainstorm what would make a place a 'happy' place and we shared these. It was quite pleasing to see some of the responses from an s1 class- things such as community were very prominent in the replies. After finishing this, everyone in the class had the opportunity to talk about their 'Happy Place', where it was and why they chose it. We are intending to map the results. Although it wasn't really what I had planned today, I really enjoyed the lesson and it was nice to be able to use something that some of the students themselves had only just heard on their own way to school.