'Mindful Brain Breaks in the Classroom'
Written by Janet Etty-Leal
Great teachers guide children how to think: not what to think. They promote personal enquiry, culminating in authentic learning experiences. Effective teachers engage children to make their own discoveries and develop a sense of agency and ownership to become life- long learners.
This is the optimal approach to teaching mindfulness to children. It is not a prescriptive, one size fits all process! When mindfulness begins to ‘make sense’ to children, they feel motivated to practice.
Attention is the pre-requisite for learning. Mindfulness offers a wide range of possibilities to embrace all learning styles, personalities and preferences as children cultivate attentional skills. Most importantly, this learning can be relatable, accessible and fun!
How can mindfulness be timetabled in a crowded curriculum?
Regular short ‘doses’ of mindful awareness have great merit: neurons that fire together, wire together and consistent practices help transform transient states of focus into lasting traits of awareness as neural networks are established. Effective, engaging practices can be offered with a duration of one to three minutes.
Short, simple opportunities can be seized to share ‘mindful doses’ in various ways:
Book End’ the day: greeting and farewells
Portals of transition: practices to segue into new activities
Dovetail with curriculum
Mindful ‘punctuation’ to refocus and refresh attention
To augment all kinds of community events
What does Mindfulness mean?
The foundation of Mindfulness begins with the quality of awareness. It is vital to develop a curious, open, kind, non-judging ‘viewing frame’: of the self, others and life. This can be explored and expanded over time.
Present-centered awareness is the next step: redirecting attention to the now… and remembering learning intentions etc.
And now the fun begins: teachers can look forward to building their own creative palette of creative mindful possibilities to share with their students!
What are the mindful starting points?
The journey begins with the 5 basic senses:
Sight
Sound
Smell
Taste
Touch
Pause for a moment, and think how many possible ways to focus and build engaging practices can be drawn from these starting points? An average classroom has all sorts of equipment, visuals, stimulus to support a wide range of opportunities.
The body is always a great place to start mindful awareness. It will always bring attention back to the present and effortlessly produce so many benefits for the mind! In my classes we always start by taking off our shoes (which improves blood circulation and brain functioning) to notice the feet. A whole lot of practices flow on as attention is shifted from thinking to sensing and feeling through the soles of the feet (stimulating thousands of nerve endings) to notice states of space, pressure, texture, alignment and balance. A mindful base is created for the body!
Literally from the ‘ground up’ all kinds of mindfulness practices can be shared with children to build focus, retune the nervous system and touch hearts and minds. Most importantly, the sense of proprioception (whole body awareness, including position and movement) is cultivated with these practices, cited by the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks as a key sense to develop. According to Dr Jarrad Coney Horvath, the author of ‘Stop Talking, Start Influencing’ we have far more than 5 senses: he identifies 21! In time, teachers can look forward to developing a wide range mindful practices to share in their classrooms.
Are teaching aids/props necessary?
The brain loves novelty and children delight in unexpected, first-hand experiences. Simple teaching aids and props bring mindful learning to life. They provide context to build concepts of mindful awareness. These can include readily available, low cost simple things like simple visuals/images (including drawings on the whiteboard), balloons, rubber bands, glitter jars, speaking sticks, bubble mix and beautiful specimens from nature like flowers, herbs, bark, feathers and leaves. I encourage teachers to work together to create resources that can be shared between classes.
What are the positive outcomes of Mindfulness in the classroom?
Daily doses of creative, simple mindfulness practices pave the way to strengthen the frontal cortex and connect children to powerful, kind and compassionate conscious choices. These practices bring many gifts to classrooms; as a culture of kind, conscious awareness is cultivated enabling harmonious relationships to flourish along with optimal learning environments.
I will be presenting a session at the National Education Summit Melbourne; 23 & 24 July 2021, in the Wellbeing conference, come along and say Hi.
Janet Etty-Leal
www.meditationcapsules.com