Strong Spirits, Kind Hearts

Strong Spirits, Kind Hearts is the first practical teacher resource to provide comprehensive coverage of all aspects of developing strong spirits and caring young people. It is focused on middle years’ students but most lessons can be adapted for older and younger students as well. This resource describes ways to incorporate emotional and spiritual supports into daily routines and interactions with students and provides ready-to-use activities, lessons and units that can be integrated into subject area teaching. This book helps teachers to:·understand the importance of strengthening students’ spirits and how this support improves students’ learning and classroom morale·build resilience and hope through their interactions with students ·distinguish between the development of strong spirits and religious education·use approaches that are respectful of religious and spiritual diversity as well as more secular views·implement a wealth of strategies, lessons, and units that develop students’ compassion and sense of connection to others and the natural world·integrate a focus on meaning and purpose within subject area lessons.

Strong Spirits, Kind Hearts is an impressive and inspiring compilation of ideas, activities and lessons that promises to enrich students' spirits within public education. Sandra Finney encourages transformational approaches to learning. Her book is a must-read that is easy to use without oversimplifying essential ideas and processes., Many people have spoken of the need to help our children and our society get from 'here'—a place where shallow materialism and dehumanizing experiences make school environments socially toxic—to 'there'—where schools are emotionally safe and spiritually affirming. Sandra Finney has done more: she has given teachers a detailed action plan and road map to help get us from here to there. I salute her!, Strong Spirits, Kind Hearts offers teachers thoughtful language to transform the relationship between educator and student. Now more than ever, we must shift education's test-driven, factory paradigm from clinical to compassionate, compulsory to exploratory, and mechanistic to spiritual. This book is a gift to help teachers make that happen. Powerful questions, discussion points, and insightful prompts from this book can help students find a new level of belonging, reflection, and understanding. If you're ready to move beyond the box, enhance your commitment to diversity and gratitude, and raise students as whole people with whole lives, start reading. Learning will transform in this guided, safe space Finney provides., The concepts presented in this book resonate with many of our First Nations and Metis cultural teachings regarding healthy holistic human development. I believe the subject matter in this compilation will be helpful towards restoring the spiritual balance within our community of learners, as we all strive for greater peace and harmony in education., Strong Spirits, Kind Hearts: Helping Students develop Inner Strength, Resilience, and Meaning meets a real need by providing teachers with holistic learning strategies that can be readily used in the classroom. Sandra Finney presents these strategies in a way that is accessible and grounded in the author's teaching experience. The ideas in this book are particularly helpful to teachers in public schools who are seeking ways to engage the whole child.

Sandra Finney has had many roles in her life time in education including public school teacher, teacher educator, and director of curriculum development for K -12 classrooms. Her interests include supporting students’ emotional and spiritual growth, critical and creative thinking abilities, and cross cultural understanding. Visit the author's web site at http://sandrafinney.com/.