This week was Digital Citizenship Week at YIS. Across the school, students were exploring what it means to be a citizen in an online world. In 2R we spoke to a degree about online safety, and different students’ online habits, but it was in exploring ideas of finding balance that we really got into it.

At present we’re knee-deep in a Unit of Inquiry looking at how lifestyle choices that people make can affect their health. As part of this, we were learning about leisure, and considering the different ways we choose to spend our free time.

On Monday, Elif came into our class and shared this video…

After watching it a few times we decided that the video was about how we sometimes ignore the people we’re with, when we’re using digital devices. Most students had had experiences of this that they wanted to share.

We used a See, Think, Wonder thinking routine to explore what we saw in the video, what we thought it might be about and what questions we had.

We spoke about how maybe the ideas around balanced nutrition that we’d been exploring could be connected with ideas around balanced leisure time. When the counselor, Ms Kumamoto, came to join us we did some thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of screen-based and non-screen based leisure choices.

We decided that we would track our leisure time for a few days to get an accurate understanding of how balanced our own behaviours were. So, over Tuesday and Wednesday students tracked the details of their leisure activities. We considered whether they were indoor or outdoor, screen or non-screen based, exciting or relaxing, done alone or together with others, and how we felt when we’d done them. We also kept track of how many minutes we spent doing each, which was a great way to learn a bit about elapsed time.

After two days of recording, on Thursday students analysed their leisure habits, looking for patterns. Many students observed big imbalances in terms of how much of their leisure time was spent indoors vs out, or involved in screen-based vs non screen-based pursuits. Armed with this better understanding of our leisure habits, some students reflected on what goals they could set to better balance their leisure time. Other students just realised that with all of their after school commitments they felt they had far too little free time to begin with.

On Friday, we’ll be sharing some of what we learned about balancing our leisure time at an assembly. Seven 2R students decided that they wanted to participate and sat down to plan what they wanted to say and how they would share the responsibilities. Stay tuned for more… Now, go  enjoy some non-screen leisure too!