Mindful Classrooms is a program through Mindful Schools, in which I have the honor of sharing mindfulness with students throughout the county. Following are the excerpts from the parent newsletter sent at the end of each week.....
Mindful Moments – week ending 9/18/15
This week your students began learning all about mindfulness! Mindfulness is an awareness and attention to what’s happening right now……not what just happened and not what we have waiting for us on our to-do-list – but right now. It’s an intentional moment of calm awareness we can all use throughout a busy day!
We are so excited to bring all your students a 15-minute mindful lesson twice a week for the next eight weeks. This week, we began with mindful bodies and focused on mindfully listening to the sounds inside of us and around us. When our mind starts to wander to thoughts or ideas, or our fingers start to wiggle, we come back to the stillness by focusing mindfully on our breath.
Mindfulness is a tool that can help us regulate our emotions, decrease impulsivity, increase empathy and emotional intelligence, as well as improve attention, focus and concentration. PLUS it’s really fun!
Mindful Family Challenge: Please ask your student to teach you what they’ve learned this week. Why is it important to listen? Why focus on what’s happening around us? Why pay attention to our breath? Have fun and become a mindful family!
Mindful Moments – week ending 9/25/15
Mindfulness is awareness and attention to what’s happening right now and this week your students continued learning all about it! As we’ve been mastering mindful listening and mindful breathing, this week our focus was on the power of sending kind thoughts and body awareness.
We began our week with considering a new word: heartfulness. We decided that we weren’t sure if it was a real word, but we were sure that it had a very real meaning. We filled our hearts with all the people we love and sent them kind thoughts. For our younger students, we then paired up in class and sent mindful wishes to our partners. For our upper grades, we continued the lesson by filling our hearts with those elementary school students affected by the fires in Lake County and sending them heart-filled, mindful kind thoughts. Regardless of where our mindful, kind thoughts were sent, we all decided that it made us feel really special (descriptive words used by your students included warm, filled up, happy, excited, caring) to think of others – and it only took a moment! There were a lot of kind thoughts coming from school this week!
We wrapped up our week with a lesson in body awareness and the importance of noticing (but not always giving too much focus to) sensations throughout our body. Body awareness assists us to link our emotions with physical sensations and, of course, our physical sensations with our emotional state. One great example was feeling pain in our stomach……are we hungry? thirsty? just hit in the stomach with a soccer ball? Or, it is possible that maybe the pain in our stomach is about our emotions? Are we feeling nervous? angry? excited? frustrated?
Mindfulness is a tool that can help us regulate our emotions, decrease impulsivity, increase empathy and emotional intelligence, as well as improve attention, focus and concentration. PLUS it’s really fun!
Mindful Family Challenge: Please ask your student to teach you what they’ve learned this week, including:
1) Why send mindful, kind thoughts to others? What does it feel like? If we’re having a bad day, could taking a moment to send mindful, kind thoughts to others help us feel better?
2) Why is it important to do a body scan? Why focus on what’s going on in our body? What could our body tell us about our emotions and feelings?
And finally, a challenge for the entire family……this weekend before lights out, each family member rests in their bed and does a body scan. It’s easy! Just start with your toes and notice all the feelings in your feet. Continue up your body, pausing periodically to focus until you reach the very tippy top of your head. Really notice what it’s like to feel your legs stretched out and sinking into the mattress, the back of your arms against the sheets, your shoulders relaxed, your head resting gently on your pillow. Enjoy this relaxing self check-in that can help slow our breath and calm us for a good evening’s rest!
Remember to take mindful family moments this weekend and have fun together!
