Hi, everybody. It's Doctor Deborah Thompson here, and I'm thrilled to be joining you right now. We're going to be talking about a particular lesson that's brand new, and it's focusing on COVID-19 and 1 health.
What this session is meant for is a train the trainer session, which means I'm going to be teaching you how to deliver this free online one health and COVID-19 lesson. Into schools and online like virtual classrooms in your community. First off, let's understand what COVID-19 actually is.
COVID-19 is a disease caused by a novel coronavirus known as SARS-COV-2, and there's some benign looking type of viruses here on the left. One health demonstrated in this Venn diagram here. Is the connection between animal health, human health, and environmental health.
The goal of this lesson is to pretty much alleviate anxiety of students ages 6 to 18, and it's meant to be taught very easily online. We're going to go into details shortly. My personal background is I'm a veterinarian.
Before being a veterinarian, I used to teach in a middle school. And I also taught in elementary schools or primary schools teaching in teaching music. I never lost my passion for teaching children, and after veterinary school, I realised that not enough children understand what one health is, the combination of animal health, human health, and environmental health.
That's why I create lesson plans. The reason today why we're talking about COVID-19 and one health is because COVID-19 is caused by that virus we discussed earlier, SARS-COV-2. That particular virus most likely came from an animal.
That's why animal health plays into human health. Let's get started. There are 2 easy ways to access the full lesson.
Again, today, this is a train the trainer session to make you more comfortable to teach this lesson, regardless of the of your background. You do not need to be a full-time teacher. You do not need to be a scientist.
You just need to have the appreciation and passion for delivering the important message that human health relies on animal health and environmental health. There are 2 easy ways to access the free lesson, One Health Lessons.com, and, or you can contact me directly at [email protected].
This is the starting slide for every lesson that you would have access to. When I say every lesson, I have various lessons. Based on what age group you are trying to teach.
Certainly, when you teach a 6 year old, it's not the exact same way as you would teach, say, an eighteen-year old. So what I need to know when you contact me is what age group you're aiming for. In this train the trainer session, we are going to go through generalities.
In general, the lesson objectives is to, like I said earlier, aim to alleviate anxiety over the novel coronavirus pandemic. It also teaches students where the virus likely came from. How the virus could have jumped species to ultimately affect people.
What actions individuals like you and me need to take in order to protect ourselves today, as well as in the future. Why scientists are currently working to create medications and vaccines, as well as who those scientists actually are on the front lines of this pandemic. Now, when it comes to this particular lesson, regardless of the age, That it's going to be delivered to.
This one lesson fulfils the needs of 9 different United Nations sustainable development goals. In the United Kingdom, there are key stage standards that need to be met to bring a lesson into a a general school setting. Of course, these are all online classes today, but teachers need to know what key stage the lesson fulfils.
And here's a quick cheat sheet. There are at least 5 keyage standards that are met for people in the UK. In the US, if you want to bring this lesson into the United States, this particular lesson meets the needs of at least 12 next generation science standards.
Now the lesson layout goes like this. It's taught via a PowerPoint. It can be taught online, and you just need to be using a simple online platform that requires 3 things.
Number 1, you need to be able to share your screen. Number 2, you need to have participants able to chat to type in a chat box. And number 3, you need to be able to mute and unmute participants.
Sample online platforms that you could use would be Zoom, for instance, or Skype. Pretty much any online platform that requires screen sharing or has screen sharing, group chat abilities, and muting unmuting abilities. Now, after the quarantine is over, everybody will be going back into brick and mortar classrooms.
At that point, you can still use this lesson in the community, you just need to have a computer and a projector. Again, anybody can teach this lesson. You do not need to be a scientist, you do not need to be a full-time teacher to teach this lesson.
Because you have notes in associated with each slide to guide you throughout the lesson. Each lesson, regardless of the age group, has a vocabulary list. Each lesson also has an interactive story that we will be reviewing today, together.
Depending on the age, there are various games, competitions, and even a video that can be shared with the students. In each lesson, there's supplemental material listed. And number 7, this particular lesson can be adjusted very easily to meet the needs of your students.
It can last as short as 15 minutes or it can last 2 hours, and for that, typically, I do recommend multiple days. It is, it even has the possibility of assigning homework. On the following slides, these are samples of slides from the lesson.
If I were to give you the whole slew of COVID-19 1 health lessons for students between the ages of 6 and 18, we are going to be on the computer for a very long time. Instead, I'm giving you a sprinkling of slides from the lessons. Keep in mind you do have guidance for each slide in the notes section, so no need to fear.
But this gives you confidence and knowledge of what you will be teaching. Depending on the age group you plan to teach, your PowerPoint may have additional or other activities to meet the needs of your students. And of course, for complete lessons, you can either go to OneHealth lessons.com or reach me directly at onehealth [email protected].
The One Health Lessons.com website is going to be launched in mid-April of 2020. The lesson reviews several vocabulary words.
When it comes to one health, as discussed before, It's the combination of human health. Animal health. And environmental health.
One health action or one health approach means the teamwork between people working with human health. Animal health and environmental health. So say veterinarians working with physicians and we are working together with environmental health scientists.
That's a simple version of what one health is. For the older students, say if you are working with secondary school students, you can expand upon that and talk about all the different professions working right now towards one goal, stopping this pandemic. Examples, physicians, nurses.
Veterinarians? Environmental health scientists. They're trying to look for the source of this virus, epidemiologists, economists, sociologists.
People working in the biotech field. You see that whole combination, that whole teamwork is known as One Health. Next we talk about species.
When I talk to children, particularly ages 6 to 10 years old, I talk to them about species by using Examples. Say for instance, if I say 2 dogs can make puppies and 2 cats can make kittens, can a dog and a cat make babies? No, because they're two different species.
I also go a bit further and I say, in a picture such as this, how many species do you see? The answer is at least 4. #1, humans, 2 dogs.
Number 3, at least one species of tree. And then at least one species of a grass. Next word is zoonotic disease.
Zoonotic disease is a disease caused by a germ that can be shared between different species. The word zoo in Greek means animal or living thing. The way I explain zoonotic disease to children is that I say in a zoo, is there just one species or are there several species?
There are several species. And different examples of a zoonotic disease could be, say, for instance, the novel coronavirus, otherwise known as SARS-COV-2, causing COVID-19. Another example is rabies.
Another example is sometimes even influenza or the flu virus. The next vocabulary word is mutations. Now, when I talk to young children, I say mutations means change.
I explained mutations can happen in people, in plants, in animals. Look how many toes this kitten has, more than normal. And also bacteria, other microbes, viruses, for instance.
When it comes to vaccines here, A vaccine is given to a person or an animal, and actually even a plant too, to help fight. A new germ coming your way. A vaccine is given before somebody is sick.
Medication is given after somebody is sick. Again, the point of a vaccine is to make your body stronger. It does not completely prevent a germ to come to you, but it makes your ability to fight that infection that much greater.
Now, the interactive story that every single lesson is going to have is focused on one health. Here you can see a healthy forest. Plants are spaced out, and so are animals.
In the 2nd slide. You see how the animals move. They have to move because people are taking up a portion of this previous forest area, and there are trees being cut down.
The animals are moving into a smaller area. Because they have increased competition for food and competition for finding shelter, they are more stressed. Just like for people who are stressed, animals that are stressed can have More signs of illness.
And look what happens. Sometimes animals are having to leave the forest. And get closer to people.
Now, the next part of one health, we already talked about environmental health, here's animal health, and here is human health. With even more people in this picture and less trees, you're gonna see more and more and more animals trying to find. A proper area in the forest to live.
But because competition is so great, they are sometimes forced out into areas where there are people. Remember what we said earlier about zoonotic diseases? Now is a good time to revisit that topic with the children.
And this particular slide demonstrates one health. You see that. Because the competition is too great, either for finding shelter or from just simply finding a meal, one bird is either leaving the forest or dying.
If there are enough birds. Dying, then the the species becomes extinct. At this point, if your students are old enough and understand the concept of climate change, you can then talk about how climate change changes habitats.
There are certain species that are very, very sensitive to temperatures, and so that can also lead to extinction if the temperature is not perfect for that particular species. I compare, and I recommend you do the same, this particular slide to the next slide. Which is this.
There are 5 changes here. Number one, there are less birds, or honestly no birds. Why is that?
Because again, increased competition for food and decrease shelter. Number 2, there are less trees. There are 2 reasons for that.
Either people are chopping down the trees, or the birds that went extinct, those could have been pollinators. And this is a really good way to enter into that conversation about pollination and the ecosystem. Another thing that you can mention is that there are more mice.
Well, some of the birds that left the forest or ultimately became extinct, could have been eating mice. When there are less predators, then there are going to be more mice. Another thing that changes on the slide is that there are more foxes.
There are more foxes because there are more mice. And last but not least, there are more animals in the area of people. Because ultimately, they have little choice.
They can either stay in a shrinking environment, as in the forest, or they are forced out of that small forest to try to look for food and shelter. At this point, you have the ability to talk about ecology, predator prey, food web, and zoonotic diseases. Keep in mind, sometimes animals, say for instance, bats, have a virus, and the virus does not cause any problem to the bat.
But if that virus jumps into another species, then it can cause problems in that other species. Here's the list, and keep in mind with this particular slide when you are teaching the lesson, there are cheat sheets in the note section. That whole activity drives home the point of what one health is and what the novel coronavirus is all about, AKA SARS CoV-2.
One health again is environmental health, animal health, and human health. We already talked about how animals and people can carry germs that do not make them sick, but sometimes those germs, when they jump into a different species, can cause illness in that other species. With the older students, it's OK to talk about people eating wild animals.
Ultimately, they do this. Well, depending on where you are in the world, some people do this because simply they have no other option for, for food, for protein. There are germs that are zoonotic, for instance, the novel coronavirus, SARSOV-2, and sometimes viruses mutate.
Such as the novel coronavirus. Mutations can happen in pretty much anything, people, animals, plants, viruses, bacteria, and more. The novel Coronavirus is zoonotic and it mutates.
At this point, you may think, OK, well that sounds very scary. I don't want to scare my students. Totally understandable.
But this particular lesson. As students say, mutations are cool. I actually saw a 10 year old student write that in the chat box during a lesson.
The way to get through the fear is by playing games and have students understand what mutations actually are. Again, for the young students, I say mutations are changes. This particular lesson has multiple interactive activities for various age groups to use word games as models for mutations in the body or even inside of a virus.
There are directions for each slide for the teachers, and teachers can pick and choose what games are best for their students. Some games Require muting and unmuting students. Other games require typing in a group chat.
Some require math like addition and or multiplication, if you want to use that with your students. Others simply require guessing, and that works very well for the young students. Here's an example of a point mutation that can happen in a virus.
But we're not using a virus as the example we're using it as a sentence. When viruses try to replicate. Too quickly, they can stumble on itself on themselves and make minor changes, minor mutations, just like the tongue with a tongue twister.
The challenge here is for the students, and you can unmute the students on the online platform and have the students say very quickly, a black bug bit a big black bear, 5 times. And you can count how many changes there are to the sentence, and those are illustrations of what a mutation is. The next Example of how a virus can mutate is based on real life.
This is just like genetic reassortment, and it's when one virus, the red virus, And a blue virus enter into the same thing and come out as a combined version of itself, red, blue, equals purple, right? Inside this mystery box is a pig. Now swine flu is was following this exact type of process.
A bird flu. And a Person, a human flu virus, and a pig virus all ended up inside of a pig. They mixed and matched and ended up having a brand new virus.
How are we going to use a word game to explain what genetic reassortment is, and specifically antigenic shift. We can use a fill in the blank game. Let's start with an example so that everybody can understand how to play the game.
This example fills in the blanks here. With a red sentence and a blue sentence, they're going to be the original sentences, as in representing and modelling the original viruses. Once upon a time, there was an extremely happy rabbit that loved to eat carrots and bananas.
The blue sentence is, once upon a time there was an extremely sneaky lion that roared to scare friends and neighbours. Now, let's see what happens when those two viruses and these two sentences combined. They make purple viruses and purple sentences.
Once upon a time, there was an extremely happy lion that loved to scare carrots and neighbours. Once upon a time there was an extremely sneaky rabbit that roared to eat friends and bananas. At this point, often you will have to pause for the children to stop laughing, and then the next slide after this particular example, you'll see a brand new fill in the blank sentence.
The students will then be instructed to type in the chat box the whole sentence in capital letters filling in the blanks. And then students will be invited to mix and match. And combine different sentences that they see in the chat box in order to make a mutated sentence.
It's a great way to explain to students that sometimes mutations can strengthen something or weaken something, or simply just change something. So, in this particular example, you could say that second sentence, once upon a time there was an extremely sneaky rabbit that roared to eat friends and bananas. Does that make more or less sense compared to the original sentence?
Often children say less, or they put their thumb down. And they say, no, it weakens the sentence. Perfect.
Sometimes mutations are not that scary. Sometimes mutations just change and then the virus does not survive, for instance. We have to understand.
And teach for the older children, how viruses are actually built. They're comprised of two things, a shell and a core. Pretty simple.
You can see that. This red shell and red core creates an entirely red virus. But this red shell and this blue core creates a mutated virus.
For older students, you can explain that the shell is what's responsible for getting into a cell, meaning the, the amount of infectivity or how easy, how easy it is to infect something else, another cell. The core here actually is RNA or DNA. And the core is responsible for how easy it is for that virus to replicate or or make more of itself.
For the older students, you can even press their knowledge and their thinking further. Compare the red virus shell to the blue virus shell. If the red virus shell has a higher infectious rate, is it more or less concerning compared to a blue virus shell?
And you can ask the same type of questions with replication. With this particular mutation, this has a high infection rate and can replicate really, really quickly and can replicate a lot. So this particular virus, this mutated version of this, This is more concerning, and actually this is the type of virus that the novel coronavirus is.
That's why it's creating such a problem throughout the world. It can infect really easily and it can replicate really easily. But look over here, this mutation weakened the virus.
This mutation has a low infectious ability, and it doesn't replicate well at all. So mutations are not necessarily something to be scared about, there's something to understand, so that way we can combat the virus properly. Last but not least, and this works for younger students, even ages 66 years old.
Talking about replications again, this demonstrates one virus replicating into this virus and then another virus. We're going to ask the children, do you think that it's going to be a red virus or say a mutated virus showing up as purple? And students can either raise one finger if they think they're original.
Colour or they can put up two fingers on the screen with their camera if they think it's gonna be purple, for instance. So you go through this activity, and it's repeated several times. You can see out of these 6 times that a virus replicated, only 1 time.
Once, did you see a mutation? Mutations are really hard to predict sometimes, and they don't happen all the time. At this point with the older students, you can talk about the difference between an RNA virus and a DNA virus.
RNA viruses like influenza or the flu vaccine flu virus, or SARS-COV-2, the novel coronavirus. RNA viruses like those two can mutate quite a bit. When it comes to DNA viruses like chickenpox.
That particular virus does not mutate very easily. This particular slide is included in every single age groups lesson. The whole point of the slide is to teach the student how to protect yourself today against this particular virus.
It combines human health and environmental health. You need to make sure that you stay clean and that you keep other people in your household safe by covering your cough and sneeze with your elbow. Make sure that you dispose of a tissue in a lined trash can and then wash your hands.
Do not touch your nose, mouth or eyes with dirty hands. Here's where the environmental health comes in. Clean your surroundings.
And keep your distance from people outside your family. When it comes to washing your hands for at least 20 seconds with soap and water, What I asked the students, and I recommend you do the same, is ask what particular song they sing when they wash their hands. They could be singing Happy Birthday twice, or the ABC's or even Let It Go from Frozen.
How can we protect ourselves in the future? We use one health, environmental health, animal health and human health. Particularly when we are developing vaccines and treatment right now, we have to have a lot of people working together.
Doctors, veterinarians. People with biotechnology backgrounds, people with environmental health sciences backgrounds, you know, a lot of medications also come from plants and other areas of the environment. It's important to have that open discussion amongst a lot of brilliant people.
It's important for the everyday person to stay away from wild animals for two reasons. We can give animals germs, and the animals can give us germs. And we have to rebuild the forest and improve the health of the environment.
One student asked, well, how can we rebuild the forest? We are not all building, putting up trees. No, not everybody is planting trees.
I said, that's right, you're, you're totally right on that. But say let's try to use more reusable bags instead of paper bags, for instance, and that way we lead to less destruction of the environment. This is a good way to get students to think outside of the box.
And again, bring home the message of what one health really is. Everything is interconnected. Some students say, I heard that a bat is the root cause of this virus, this COVID-19 inducing virus, the novel coronavirus.
And we should just get rid of the bats. Well, the problem with that is bats are incredibly important. This is a really good opportunity for students to understand what how there's predator and prey in an ecosystem.
There's also something called a keystone species. When Keystone species are lost in an ecosystem, the rest of the ecosystem falls apart. Bats are incredibly important for not just pollination or pollinating, but also they keep everything else in balance.
They're eating insects. So bats are incredibly important. In some areas of the world, if you get rid of bats, you get rid of whole forests.
You get rid of whole ecosystems. This lesson has supplemental material. There are links available to other online lessons either by way of video games or news articles, and if you want any additional learning material, you can always access.
COVID-19 material or and one health material on. This website, One Health Lessons.com, and again, it's going to be launched in mid-April of 2020.
The other way you can contact, the other way you can access this lesson is by contacting me at onehealth [email protected]. I ask you to do 4 things with that particular request.
Number 1, in the subject line, just write down COVID-19 1 health lesson request. Number 2, explain what age group you intend to teach. And then that way I can send you the appropriate lessons.
Number 3, where do you intend to teach that lesson? Do you plan to bring it to an online classroom? Do you plan to bring it to a Girl Guides online meeting or a board, a boy guides online meeting, or say you want to even use this to educate adults.
That's totally fine, and you want to bring it into your community using, say, Rotary Club or Toastmasters International Club. Any type of community club is, is a great venue to bring this lesson to. It's just important for me to know where you intend to use it so that I can give you tips and tricks with how to teach the lesson.
Last but not least, just agree to complete a two-minute online survey after you finished teaching the lesson. Thank you very much for your attention, and I hope you have a lot of fun with this important COVID-19 and one health lesson in your community.
