On Monday, 4/3/17, we are hosting the second round of our Panther "Pause" Challenge Sessions in order to reach more students. The introductory session will be in room 619 (the PRISM room) during 7th and 8th grade flex and 6th grade lunch. People who have already attended the sessions can come to this round as well! This time, we offer more activities such as mindful sports and outdoor meditation, mainly because the weather is nicer. We'll have Attitudes in Reverse come back with therapy dogs, and host two DIY mindfulness sessions!
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We have previously been in contact with Dr. Vo via twitter - we are one of his followers and he has re-tweeted many of our tweets already. Recently, we have been talking to him via Twitter and set up a skype. Beforehand, we brainstormed questions to ask Dr. Vo, including ones about his personal mindfulness practice, motivation for writing The Mindful Teen, and how he measures the benefit of mindfulness in his students.
Today, we had another opportunity to talk to the Trisquel International School in Spain and teach them more about mindfulness in our Mindful Mondays program (though not always on Monday). This time, we taught them about mindful walking and glitter jar meditation, holding up a glitter jar to the computer screen and giving oral instructions while the students looked at the jar from the other side. Some members of our team also took Spanish in our school, so a few of the instructions that we gave were in Spanish! We look forward to more skypes with the Trisquel International School and other schools to further spread our mindfulness teachings!
As you may remember from last year, we presented at the NJAGC (New Jersey Associate for Gifted Children) about healthy coping strategies and social-emotional learning for gifted students. This year, we were invited back to the conference to present again, this time to teach educators about mindful coping strategies aimed to reduce both student and teacher stress.
Dr. MC originally introduced us, talking a bit about what we did last year including CASEL - a social emotional chart, Wellness Fair, and sessions. To end the session, we held a Q&A where teachers could ask us more about our mindfulness training programs and other questions.
After the session, we had many teachers come up to us, interested in our Panther "Pause" Challenge course online, which they wanted to use with their students. This gave us a great opportunity to implement mindfulness in more classrooms. On Saturday, March 11th, our team went to Kean University to compete in the Future Problem Solving (FPS) competition in the category Community Problem Solving. This is the second time we've attended this competition - once last year when we were focusing on healthy coping strategies for our peers, and once this year while focusing on mindful coping strategies for the educational community. We walked away from this event with 1st place among all the middle division CmPS teams. This means that we'll be going to the International Competition in June at Wisconsin! Last year, we attended the IC in Michigan. We will use feedback that we receive from judges to improve our display, video, and scrapbook at the International Competition! Go NüYü!
This Sunday, 3/5, we held a mindfulness session at the Plainsboro Library for parents. During this hour-long session, we discussed various mindful coping strategies that parents could utilize in their families and especially with their children. First, we led participants through the Autopilot Activity, which we mentioned in previous posts. Instructions for that are in the Panther "Pause" Challenge Online Course section of our website. Then, we continued a discussion about mindfulness and how to use it in everyday life.
All in all, the session was a great success and we gained lots of positive feedback from the participants. We plan on having another library session in the future. Keep an eye out for that! |