My Wellbeing – Year 1 is the first book in a new Junior Cycle SPHE series from Anne Jones, Anita Stackpoole and Fiona Chambers, the bestselling authors of the Junior Cycle SPHE series, Minding Me: My Wellbeing and the Senior Cycle SPHE textbook, It’s Your Wellbeing.

My Wellbeing is based on the new SPHE Short Course specification.

Taking a compassionate and common sense approach throughout, this Year 1 book from the series covers all 4 strands. A spiral approach is used to unpack the learning outcomes appropriate for First Year from each strand.

Feedback from teacher & student focus groups on the Short Course specification has been incorporated into our series:

• ensuring empathy is the foundation of all learning throughout the course.
• widening the lens to include social responsibility rather than just individual rights.
• using dialogue in the classroom as a learning strategy.
• acknowledging that students are not always the main decision makers over all aspects of their lives.

Pair work and group work is provided via plenty of easy-to-follow activities.

The three cross-cutting elements – Awareness, Dialogue and Reflection & Action – appear throughout all chapters, referenced by clear icons.

Case studies occur throughout the book dealing with issues that teenagers will find relevant.

My Wellbeing – Year 1 is supported by a free Teacher Resource Book with the essential key points to know from the Specification, as well as guidance on tackling key topics and tips on how to teach the course.

My Wellbeing – Year 2 is also available.

My Wellbeing -Year 3 will be available in Spring 2025.

Our experienced SPHE authors have compiled a series of podcasts to help time-short teachers as they approach this new specification.

 Podcast series

A 4-part episode series has been developed by our authors. Episodes One to Three are now available to listen. Click the Podcast Episode 1 tab on the top of this page to listen to Episode One now. The other two episodes can be accessed from our Digital Resources on this site.

This first episode covers a lot of ground, including (but not limited to) the differences between the previous SPHE course and this new course introduced in Sept 2023, can a teacher learn to love teaching SPHE, can you teach the course in the time allotted, what takes longer to teach than you expect, how much group work is enough, SPHE homework: yes or no, the use of walking debates in the SPHE classroom.

Happy listening!