Mental health literacy includes knowledge about mental health conditions, prevention, and management. Developing students’ mental health literacy helps increase opportunities for early intervention, reduce strain on crisis systems and families, improve productivity in schools, and support healthy relationships between students and educators.
FLARE by NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) supports mental health literacy by providing 23 no-cost, classroom-ready, flexible lessons for every educator.
In Lesson 1, students learn that mental health is a key component of health that impacts everyone, not just those who experience a mental health condition. The lesson also demonstrates how mental health and physical health are connected. Through the lesson, students gain an introduction to general wellness, mental health, and wellbeing.
Lesson 11 highlights positive mental health by helping students develop healthy coping strategies. The lesson has two parts—one part demonstrates several relaxation methods; the other suggests additional coping strategies or activities.
Lesson 13 also has two parts. In this lesson, students learn about verbal and nonverbal communication, as well as active empathetic listening. They are also reminded of clues that indicate they may want to reach out to a trusted adult for support.
Teachers can review these lessons and browse the full Lesson Library online. Each lesson page includes a downloadable PDF of the entire lesson, instructional videos for teachers, an accompanying PowerPoint deck, printable handouts, and additional resources.
Teachers can use the lesson plans exactly as they are when downloaded, or they can customize the lessons to best fit their students’ needs and their local and state education requirements.
Teachers can also use FLARE’s drag-and-drop curriculum builder to create sets of lessons on topics they want to include in a custom curriculum, and in a sequence that makes the most sense for their learners.