Cancer Lesson

This week, I learned that one of my students is just beginning a long battle of an assist in the brain. Another student in the same class is currently battling a form of cancer in the brain and undergoing chemo treatments. The teacher requested some kind of lesson to help the rest of the class deal with this and offer some hope and courage. I panicked because I only had less than one day to figure out what I was going to do. Luckily, as I was searching for a good book, I stumbled upon "The Lemonade Club" by Patricia Polacco. It is about a student that gets cancer and come to find out, her teacher does to. It also talks about when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. I read this to my class and as we were having a discussion about the idiom, we made lemonade, and the class voted on what they wanted to name their class in support of our two students. It was decided that this class was now "The Lemonade Troopers." The class was able to absorb the message and have some kind of hope by thinking positive and making the best out of the situation at hand. I was fighting tears the whole time and after the lesson was finished, I was drenched in sweat! I learned that our bodies shed tears other ways than just our eyes!


Some additional questions to ask:
Everyone has to face hard things in life.....how do we do that successfully?
What can we do to support our classmate?
What might it be like having brain cancer? How will things change?
How can we support and encourage one another?


Other Lesson Ideas:
Incorporate the GPS Lessons by explaining there are things that happen that we can't control. use the book "Leo The Lightning Bug" by Eric Drachman. By talking about how there are some things that happen that we can't control, but we can control how we react to them. Talk about how I wasn't able to control those things, but now how I use GPS to help me calm down, accept it, and then how I can solve the problem.

GPS Lesson #1:
http://www.davis.k12.ut.us/district/studentserv/counseling/files/EB2215476F1A4FACB3EBC6487BB69D12.pdf
GPS Lesson #2:
http://www.davis.k12.ut.us/district/studentserv/counseling/files/6AFC0ABD1DCD478EBA3C52DC8101B23F.pdf

Books:






















Helpful Websites:

I also was made aware of this great service to offer someone who has cancer. It is a free cleaning service for 4 months. Please go to: http://www.cleaningforareason.org/
Another great resource is the American Cancer Society: http://www.cancer.org/docroot/HOME/indexA.asp