ESL Mental Health Daily Writing Journals

These writing prompts make bell-ringer activities for middle and high school ELA and ESL are ready to be added into your daily routine. These ready to print booklets are easy to use, include evaluation sheets, and integrate planning directly in the writing process.

This resource includes my topics 6-10 which revolve around mental health reflection and opinion development. These questions are not intended for younger students.

The topics are:

• general mental health
• stress
• anxiety
• mental health expectations, stereotypes, and stigmas
• medication and therapy

Examples:

• How can you take care of your mental health daily? Why would this help?
• Who is one person who helps you manage your stress? Why does this person help?
• Do you think the stigmas around mental health stop people from talking about it? Why do you feel that way?

Once added to the daily routine, students will easily be able to do their journals with substitute teachers and will no longer await instruction at the beginning of class.

When used as a pre-assessment, these writing prompts define the writing baseline for your students and determine the needs that need to be met in your instruction. It also allows you to be ready if any cheating happens later in the year. This resource is also used as a formative and summative assessment.

In this 143 page pdf document:

• Teacher instructions with pages that can be projected in class for instructional time
• A list of all the writing prompts with a page per prompt that can be projected in class during writing time
• 4 journal pages without questions in each format
• 4 formats of booklets with the questions already on them:
  1. Half-page with no planning spaces
  2. Full page with no planning spaces
  3. Half-page with planning spaces
  4. Full page with planning spaces
• 3 formats of evaluation sheets each with the option of a grade or no grade