PPZ3C
Unit 1: Factors That Determine Good Health
Activity 5: How Can We Measure Wellness?
In Activity 4, we looked at Jim’s life and the choices that affected his health which ultimately led to his heart attack.
What will your life look like in ten years? What will your life look like in your later years?
Assignment: Letter to My Older Self
Think of where you would like to be in the later years of your life. What kinds of activities will be important to you, and how do you see yourself spending your time once you retire?
Write a letter to your 65 year-old self that describes what you hope your life will be like.
Include the following details in your letter:
- your hopes about where you will live;
- the important people you hope are in your life who will contribute to your happiness;
- what you plan to do throughout your earlier life to make sure you can lead a healthy life at 65;
- the hobbies you hope to pursue; and
- the activities you will be involved in to maintain your health.
Feel free to include other information that you feel might be important.
Choosing to live a life that is healthy will improve many aspects of your life, such as how you feel and look, how well you cope with stress, how you feel in a relationship, and even how well you eat. The healthy choices you make today will lead to better health, not only for today or tomorrow, but throughout your life.
You may have made a decision to change but you still might be asking yourself questions like the following. Where do I start? Who can I ask for help? What should I think about changing to live a fuller, healthier life that focuses on quality versus quantity?
This video provides some helpful tips to get started.
Before watching the video, consider the following statements and think carefully about whether you agree or disagree with each one:
- Being healthy is a frequent goal for people.
- Living an unhealthy lifestyle can lead to cancer.
- Most people make the mistake of trying to transform their lives overnight.
- Starting slowly helps you have better success in setting a health goal.
- There is a point when it is too late to start to make changes to your health.
- It is the big successes that count.
After watching the video, consider these statements again, do you agree or disagree with them now?
- Being healthy is a frequent goal for people.
- Living an unhealthy lifestyle can lead to cancer.
- Most people make the mistake of trying to transform their lives overnight.
- Starting slowly helps you have better success in setting a health goal.
- There is a point when it is too late to start to make changes to your health.
- It is the big successes that count.
How Do I Know I am Ready?
Before you begin any new form of exercise or fitness, it is important for you to consider your own personal readiness. Being more active is very safe for most people, and should not pose any problem or hazard. However, for some people who have not been physically active for a while and/or may have underlying health issues, it is good practice to check with a doctor before starting an exercise program or becoming much more physically active.
Completing a PAR-Q, a Physical Activity Readiness Questionnaire, can also help you determine your readiness. A PAR-Q is a list of questions that should be answered by anyone who is looking to start an exercise program, increase their current activity level, or partake in a fitness testing assessment. The questionnaire helps to determine how safe it is for a person to engage in physical activity.
Assignment: My Physical Activity Readiness Assessment
Read the questions on this Get Active Questionnaire. As you read, make note of your answers.
Once you have answered all the questions, consider the following:
- If you answered YES to any of the questions, it is important to check with your doctor as you will be creating your own personal wellness plan that includes physical activity. Therefore, you will need professional advice about your limits.
- If you answered NO to all of the questions, you can be reasonably sure that you can start becoming much more physically active or take part in a physical fitness appraisal. Begin slowly and build up gradually. This is the safest and easiest way to go.
As with many factors related to good health, a person’s personal wellness can periodically change. This might restrict her or his level of participation. What other health conditions might affect a person’s ability to take part in physical activity? What might she or he do to resolve these conditions?
Part of making a personal wellness plan is completing personal wellness inventories that allow you to get an excellent picture of where you are today. These inventories might help you assess your mental, physical, and emotional health, the health of your relationships, your sleep, your nutrition, and other factors that make up a healthy lifestyle? Let’s take a closer look at a variety of wellness inventories.
Time to gather and organize, interpret and analyze...
Assignment: How to Search for Answers - Assessing Current Health Habits
In the last activity, you analysed your sources for reliability and accuracy, but with so much information out there, how can you sift through it all and get to what is useful to your investigation? How can you avoid surfing the Internet for hours and getting nowhere?
The first step is learning how to search for what you are looking. Take a look at the resources for searching for new information about fitness below.
Resources
- Lifehack 20 Tips To Use Google Search Efficiently
- How To Google Like A Pro! Top 10 Google Search Tips and Tricks
The second step to avoid getting lost in searching for information on the Internet is to be able to skim and scan information you find (whether it is in a book, an article, a website, or a video) and determine whether or not it has information/evidence that will answer the question you are investigating.
Read the following information about skimming and scanning. It will help you skim and scan information on websites in the following assignment.
| SKIMMING | |
|---|---|
| What is it? | When you SKIM, you read quickly to get the main idea of a paragraph, page, chapter, or article, and a few (but not all) of the details. |
| Why do I skim? | Skimming allows you to read quickly to get a general sense of a text so that you can decide whether it has useful information for you. You may also skim to get a key idea. After skimming a piece, you might decide that you want or need to read it in greater depth. |
| How do I skim? Read from left to right... |
|
| SCANNING | |
|---|---|
| What is it? | When you SCAN, you move your eyes quickly down a page or list to find one specific detail. |
| Why do I scan? | Scanning allows you to quickly locate a specific fact, date, name, or word in a text without trying to read or understand the rest of the piece. You may need that fact or word later to respond to a question or to add a specific detail to something that you are writing. |
| How do I scan? Read downwards and towards the right... |
|
From Ministry of Education: Think Literacy Cross Curricular Approaches 7-12, 2004
Assignment: Are My Personal Habits Healthy?
In order to develop a personal wellness plan, you need to first assess your current health behaviours.
Your task is to gather information about your eating habits, stress levels, and physical wellness and/or activity levels. Use the graphic organizers below to complete this task.
- Choose one inventory/questionnaire and one guideline from the lists on this graphic organizer. You must find three websites that provide information about your chosen inventory/questionnaire and guideline.
- Skim and scan each website to determine if the information would be relevant and useful in answering the inquiry question. You may find that a website you have searched is not related to what you’re looking for or isn’t a reliable source.
- Choose the website with an inventory/questionnaire you think works best, complete it, and record what you learned about your health habits from your results.
- Choose the website with the guidelines you think are the most relevant and reliable. Record what you learned about your health habits in relation to the guidelines.
The inventories and guides you completed as part of the Assignment have provided you with some information to help you assess your wellness. However, to acquire a complete understanding of all the factors that affect your health, it is important for you to consider all dimensions of wellness: physical, mental, spiritual, social, and other dimensions, as well. By assessing all of the dimensions of wellness, you will also have a better idea of your strengths as well as areas that you might want to focus on to improve your overall wellness. Knowing your strengths and needs will help you make decisions about the food you choose to eat, your level of physical activity, managing stress, and other skills that will help you have a healthier, more balanced life. Knowing your strengths and needs will also help you create a more individualized wellness plan to meet your personal goals.
Hover over each part of the wellness wheel below to review the seven components of wellness. As you review each component, think about what you have learned about your own wellness and what you might need to find out more about.
Assignment: What Do I Now Know About My Overall Wellness and What I Want to Know More About
It is now time for you to gather all of the information you have learned about your wellness from the assessments you have completed so far in this unit. You will now consider questions that might help you gather more information about each component of your personal wellness.
Complete this graphic organizer to build a picture of your personal wellness and identify questions you still have about each component of wellness.
- Review the results of the Wellness Quiz you completed in Activity 2 of this unit to determine your strengths and areas of need for each component of wellness. Add this information to the second and third columns of your graphic organizer.
- Review the information you collected from the inventories you completed in Assignment 3 of this activity and add this information to your graphic organizer.
- Hover over each component of wellness on the learning tool below to reveal questions that you might ask yourself when thinking about that particular component of your personal wellness. Select one or two of the questions that interest you or relate to your own wellness. Answering these questions will help you gather more information about your wellness. Record your selected question in Column 4 on your graphic organizer and then answer your question.
- Once you have completed Steps 1 to 3, check to see that you have gathered enough information about your strengths and needs for each component to have a complete picture of your personal wellness.
- Use the skills you learned for gathering information from the Internet to find and complete any additional assessments or to answer your selected questions.
- Use all of the information in your graphic organizer to write a brief paragraph that answers our inquiry question: How healthy are my current personal wellness habits? Your paragraph must summarize your strengths and your needs.
Assignment: What Will Be Your First Step to Better Wellness?
Imagine that each of the above steps represent the transition to better wellness and a healthy, balanced lifestyle. Each step represents one of the components of wellness and one step in your journey. Although they stand alone, they are also all interconnected to support your journey to better wellness. Think of this image as you prioritize your steps to better wellness.
Answer the following questions using the information you have gathered about your personal wellness habits from the various appraisal tools and your graphic organizer from Assignment 5. Justify your answers with specific points from your graphic organizer.
- First Step:
- Which of the seven dimensions of wellness would you say is the most important to focus on as the first step to improving your wellness?
- What do you want to improve about this dimension of wellness? What is your motivation for wanting to focus on this dimension?
- How would focusing on this dimension affect the other dimensions of your personal wellness?
- Next Steps:
- Which dimensions would you place on the next three steps in order of importance to improve your wellness?
- What do you want to improve about these dimensions of wellness? What is your motivation for wanting to focus on this dimension?
- How would focusing on these dimensions affect the other dimensions of your personal wellness?
- Final Steps:
- Which dimensions of wellness would you place on the final steps to improving your wellness? These are still important to your overall wellbeing but may not be your focus at present.
- What might you want to improve about these dimensions of wellness in the future and why?
- How would focusing on these dimensions affect the other dimensions of your personal wellness?
Introduction
Learning Goals and Success Criteria
Learning Skills and Work Habits
Rubric 1