Stress Intro Activity

Lesson: Stress

Unit: Mental and Emotional Health

Age: Middle or High School

Prep: Create a fake Pop-Quiz with difficult (but plausible) questions

How I teach the lesson:

I begin class like normal with my students going through their beginning of class routine of writing in journals, passing out papers, and doing an energizer (during journals I usually play the song Stressed Out by Twenty One Pilots). Once this is done I turn on my PowerPoint and inform my students that they will be having a Pop Quiz and that they need to get out a piece of paper and pencil, number the paper 1-7, and clear everything else off their desks. I play this off as casually as possible tell them that the quiz should be quick and easy since all of the information is review from other classes that they’ve had. I then continue in the PowerPoint to the first slide so they can see the 7 questions and tell them they have 5 minutes. For the quiz I intentionally choose questions that I know they haven’t covered yet in my class or other classes so they will be unable to answer most of them. Once the 5 minutes have passed I tell them to put away their pencils and pass their papers up to the front. After all of the papers have been collected I begin to go through the questions one by one knowing full well that they don’t know the answers to the questions. After 2-3 questions I then inform the students that it was all a hoax and proceed to go to the next slide of my PowerPoint where I tell them we will be talking about Stress. From here we have a short discussion not about the Emotions that they felt, but how their bodies felt before, during, and after the quiz. Finally we move into the main part of the lesson and continue via a PowerPoint discussion.

I love this activity as it allows the students to experience a stressful situation before the lesson even begins. This always leads to a great discussion initially and throughout the rest of the lesson, particularly when I talk with them about Psychosomatic Responses. It’s also always interesting to see if there are some students that react positively to the stressful situation and simply get more focused during the quiz.