The lesson plans in this resource are designed to support educators in providing students with authentic, relevant, and contextual learning experiences that assist them in acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills to be health literate and media literate.
The resources may be used with students in a variety of settings to help them deepen their understanding of vaccines, factors that affect decision-making related to vaccines, and the skills to participate in decision-making about vaccines. The lesson plans may be used as stand-alone activities or extensions to the Healthy Living lessons related to Personal Safety and Injury Prevention and Human Development and Sexual Health.
At the elementary level, lesson plans are division-focused, two per division (primary, junior, and intermediate). Each lesson plan includes references to the overall expectations for the Healthy Living Strand and Social Emotional Learning Skills in The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1–8: Health and Physical Education (2019) and the overall expectations in the Literacy Connections and Applications, Comprehension: Understanding and Responding to Texts, and Composition, Expressing Ideas and Creating Texts strands in The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1–8: Language (2023) to promote opportunities for integrated cross-curricular learning.
Lesson Plans use an Inquiry-based Learning Approach to enable students to pose questions and explore information from various sources to answer their questions. Through this approach, students are encouraged to consider additional questions on the topic and identify credible sources of information to find answers. Students are continually invited to connect their growing understanding of vaccines, their health, their perspectives about vaccines, and their decisions regarding vaccinations.