Adams City High School YESS Program : The Brain, YESS is LOVE, and Learning about US!

The past two weeks have been so busy here in our YESS room!

Where to even start. Well, last week was a short week because of our 3 day weekend and with Friday being a half day but we still managed to get a lot done. We ended our web of emotions posters from the week before and related it a lot to the movie Inside Out- its crazy how we all have those core emotions in us that make up memories and make up who we are. We also liked discussing how happiness would be nothing without sadness, they are the ying and yang to each other, if you will. Also the week before last was Valentines day and instead of it being a cheesy holiday that makes us all feel like single sad lonely saps we filled our day with love and talked about what we love about ourselves and what we value in each other. Castro gave each of us individual valentines that had little notes saying what she loved about each of us, it made us feel special. We also talked about the concept of love and what the definition means to all of us and how we can love in a lot of ways- friends, family, significant others, passions. We each had a different explaination for what love is to us and it was cool to hear everyones own version of that word. I was hard to put love into a one word defintion, maybe the hardest thing I have done all year lol it took everyone a long time because we had never really thought of that before. It was great to tie in the relationship unit with emotions and also with the empowering discussion on self love that we need to have in order to spread our love to others more authentically. I got to know my classmates better during this talk with everyone. We also played a bonding game on Valentines day to bring us closer together as a class. All the classes competed to get the longest time to keep the balloons up with only our shoulders and heads. Period 2 won with a whopping 52 seconds! They win a box of pizza the day we get out for sping break, i am jalous. We also worked on the emotions word search and went into our discussion and lesson on the human brain. we asked, what intrigues you about the human brain and how do you think a teenage brain differs from an adult brain? We watched some videos describing the answers to this and learned that it stops growing at 25! We are in the important developmental years for our brain so we need to take advantage of what a sponge that this organ really is. We did an opening poster project with the lymbic system, prefrontal cortex, and hormones. Puberty effects the brain too and can make us do risky things and sometimes we have a hard time making real sense of consequences. Also we had a lot of mentor leader meetings to discuss the lessons and practice giving them, we do meetings twice a week now and it is good because we are all being pushed outside of our comfort zone and growing as leaders and professionals!

Here are some pics from everything explained above!!!