Breath.......

Art Class Project

During this past school year I’ve been listening to the Living Wisdom School teachers in Palo Alto talk about having their students BREATH.  They are my go to inspiration for how to follow the Education for Life principles.  So as they talked about their experiences in encouraging their students to breath I paid attention.  After all, I know from my own yoga practice that the breath is a physical way to control our thoughts, emotions, and energy.  Can you use breathing anytime anywhere?  Yes!  You do not need to pull out your yoga mat or meditation pillow in order to stop, breath, and relax.  I tried it with my students and the results were instantaneous!  

The first time I tried it was with Oliver (not his real name) in my art class.  Oliver was wound up and going at 100 mph: talking, out of his seat and bothering even his friends.  I went over to him and out of desperation asked him to stop and take a big breath, let it out, and count the next 100 normal breaths.  I was amazed when he did it with no further prompting from me. As he finished counting his last breath he picked up his markers, went back to work calmer than I had ever seen him before. 

It even works with students that don’t know me.  As I was walking across our large middle school campus on my way to my first class I was going through our crowded courtyard with hundreds of 6th, 7th, 8th graders.  (We have over 1000 students.)  I saw a group of 8th grade boys overly rambunctious and rough-housing with one another.  Instead of hollering at them to keep their hands off each other I told them to stop and take a big breath and relax.  I was amazed when they in unison stopped and took a big breath like they were in the middle of a yoga class and then smiled at me like I had done them a big favor. 

What a useful tool to give these students and it is so simple.   

Our November Gratitude Garden

        Our personal excellence quality for the month of November was, of course, ‘gratitude'.  Everyday the students and I each thought of at least one thing that we were grateful for.  After seeing a unique way to make a thank you card on Pinterest I decided to have each student make their own ‘gratitude flower’.
 http://ideas.tpet.co.uk/thank-you-flower/
They wrote one thing they were thankful for on one petal a day and at the end of the month they  each put their own flower of gratitude together.  It was wonderful to see each student get in the habit of looking for all the things that they were grateful for in their lives.  We are so fortunate to have so much bounty in our everyday world and we seldom stop and appreciate how lucky we are.  I put up our flowers on our ‘Gratitude Garden’ wall so that we would remember to continue to be grateful and just so we could admire them.

Students wrote one or more things they were grateful for in their life everyday on a petal.  At the end of the month they cut them out, we hole punched the leaves, and used a brass fastener to hold them together.

Random Acts of Courage

       In case people are wondering if I'm still practicing Education for Life in my public school classroom the answer is a resounding,  "Yes!!"     EFL is becoming part of my DNA.   I work with a whole new batch of 6th graders every year which lets me reuse and expand the activities that I liked, that worked in the previous two years, and that I feel will benefit this year’s 6th graders.   
        One thing that I am doing this year is extending the Personal Excellence qualities or universal principals from previous years.  I’m using a “Word of the Month”.  This is not a new idea.  What is different is the depth of use.  Whatever quality I pick is our theme for the month.  For example, I chose “Helpfulness” for September.  Being helpful is an activity that will lead the students to begin the year successfully, allow them to experience the joy of giving to others, and help them to be the type of person others would want to include as their friend.
       At first I let them practice “helpfulness” on their own while documenting their experiences daily in their writing journal.    We also read stories of people that showed this quality and we looked for this quality in historical figures in Social Studies.  Half way through September the activities were feeling a bit static so I found a “Random Acts of Kindness Board” activity on the web. http://www.pinterest.com/pin/531706299727236292/


      I went ahead re-wrote and tailored it to “Random Acts of Helpfulness”.  By the end of the month the students were in the habit of looking for ways to be helpful in class, at school, at home as well exercising their will to finish the challenge of finishing the "Random Acts of Helpfulness" board.

For October the word is “Courage” and within a few days of practicing courage the students were clamoring for a “Random Acts of Courage” handout.  They were having a hard time figuring out how to be courageous and they wanted the challenge of trying to finish 16 acts of courage.  At first they thought courage meant things like saving someone from a burning building.  But soon they realized that it's the small acts of courage that prepare you for the bigger acts of bravery.  This time they came up with all 16 acts of courage ideas themselves and I just wrote it up for them.  This is what they picked.

Yoga Club Is Fun

As 2013 comes to an end I’m happy to report on the success of  the Yoga Club at our public school.  It is off to a great start this first half of the school year.  16 girls and 3 brave boys from 6th and 7th grade signed up to do yoga once a week for an hour and a half.  We have anywhere from 11 to 19 students show up every week.  We incorporate breathing exercises, yoga postures, and meditation into our practice.  The school bought us yoga mats, blankets, and straps and is funding the program for the rest of the school year.  We practice in the cafeteria where the custodians are kind enough to move aside the tables so that we may have a big space to unroll our yoga mats.  Being involved with the relaxation techniques of yoga from an early age will give these students a strong grounding in calmness, concentration and focus that they may carry with them for their entire lives.  It’s been wonderful to see that our whole community understands this, including our administration, parents, other teachers and, of course, the students.  

2nd Year with EFL in Public School

    This new school year I started having the students take mini yoga and meditation breaks as early on as possible in my 6th grade class.  The response is always enthusiastic.  Kids love doing yoga and meditation.  They think it’s cool and they like the challenge.  After completing my Yoga Teacher Training this summer with Ananda Yoga, I’ve decided to start a weekly yoga club after-school.  I am grateful for the support of our new principal, who is willing to fund the project.  The club will start in late October and I will post an update on this blog as it progresses. 
    In the mean time I’ve found a very successful way of expanding our meditation time in our classroom. This summer I participated in the New Tomorrow Summer Camp at Ananda Meditation Retreat and watched Nitai Deranja lead families, with children as young as five, through a series of classes on meditation and yogic principles. (see his blog for lesson plans) http://laughterisjoy.wordpress.com/dalai-lama-children-meditation-and-patanjali/
Nitai showed how using a bell to mark the passing of time while children meditate lets them bring their focus back to calmness.  In our class we are aiming at meditating regularly for 15 minutes.  The students easily meditate for 5 minutes at a time so far and I am confident that they will reach 15 in no time.  Ringing the bell at intervals seems to work like magic. They love the challenge and I can see that their little shoulders relax and they are less tense at the end of our sessions. 
    It’s, also,  interesting to see which activities from last year naturally continue this school year.  One obvious activity is the Personal Excellence Qualities. (see Sept. 22, 2012 blog) That seems to be the heart of my attempt at using EFL principles in a public school setting.  It’s such a natural extension of the values that we are trying to instill in our middle school students. It’s also a focus for me as a teacher.  It reminds me to expand these qualities in myself.  We put up our Personal Excellence board right away and had the students pick personal qualities that they wanted to work on to be their true best selves.  We are also identifying these qualities in the characters in our stories and novels.  This time I started out the year asking right away if they knew of anyone who exhibited all the high qualities on our board.  It was interesting to see that the replies were much the same as last year.  The students mentioned God, people like Martin Luther King Jr., and again many said their mom, which was very sweet. 

Refreshing Our Bodies and Brains

    The past few weeks the students have had so much going on that we are helping them relieve stress with short hikes around our campus.  I cannot take credit for this idea.  This was suggested and begun by the other Liz on our team.  I was fortunate enough to recognize what a great and much needed activity this was especially as the year finishes with many standardized test from the state as well as the district.  Between all the test taking and the anticipation of summer vacation the students, not to mention the teachers, have been vibrating with undulating emotions and energy.
    My art class (our exploratory class time) has enough flexibility that I can take the students on a 45 minute hike every couple of weeks.  It’s been interesting to see how the students respond to this activity.  The light, feeling students were upset to find garbage along the path the first time we did this.  Now we make sure that we have bags for them to collect the garbage, which they do gladly as a way to help the environment.  The ego-active students use the time to socialize and tease each other.  Even the heavy students find their spirits lifting with fresh air, natural beauty, and exercise.  It was interesting to see my intellectual students bringing their math notes and spiral notebook so they could study for a test.  Yes, they were actually writing equations as they walked along.  We are fortunate that we can get out in nature and refresh ourselves.

Practicing Personal Excellence Qualities

      One of the strongest concepts that I’m using this school year because of EFL has been the ‘personal excellence’ qualities.  I’ve tried different approaches to help my students build a strong foundation in the many universal principles that make human beings reach a higher potential.  Qualities such as kindness, compassion, love, courage, respect, patience, positiveness, helpfulness to name some of my favorites.  My latest approach has been to work together with each individual class on one particular quality per month.  I went ahead with this idea after reading another EFL blog by the Living Wisdom School teachers in Nevada City. See the link below.
 Sharing Harmony with Teenagers–A Game
   http://lightlyifly.wordpress.com/home-page/lets-take-the-cant-out/

    I had both my morning class and my afternoon class list some of the qualities that they had personally been working on.  Then we voted on one quality to work on as a class for a whole month.  Each week they work on their chosen class quality and write at least three example of how they used that quality in their composition book.  We get together and share our experiences once a week.  We share in different ways at different times, either in small groups, as a whole class, or both.
    For example, for April my morning class picked ‘respect’.  I asked  them to define ‘respect’ in their own words.  They came up with, “You should treat others the way you want to be treated.”  We also looked it up in the dictionary and found synonyms like consideration and appreciation.  Some of the examples of how they have practiced respect have included
respecting their environment by picking up garbage and helping to clean up their school,
respecting their parents when they are on the phone by not interrupting,
respecting their dog by not forgetting to feed it.
    The afternoon class voted on the quality of ‘being positive’.  Again they came up with their own definition like “seeing the good in things” and “confidence” which was pretty close to the definition that we found in our dictionary.  There were many examples from my physical students about playing a game in their chosen sport where their team was losing and they did not give up and kept going.  Some won some lost but they all agreed they felt better because they knew they tried their best, stayed positive and they didn't give up.  My favorite example was from one of the physically biggest boys in class who came up with such a feeling example.  He said, “I practiced being positive this past week when my grandmother passed away.  I chose to not be so sad and I thought about all the good times I had with her.” 

      I also asked them the other day, as we looked at our ‘Personal Excellence’ board,  “Can you think of anyone that you know or have learned about that could possibly have all of the personal excellence qualities on our board?”  I loved their answers!  The first girl said, “God!”  Another said, “Moses!”  (We are studying the Hebrews and Judaism in Social Studies.) Yet another said, “Martin Luther King Jr.”  More than one student said, “My mom!”

    It’s an honor to learn and practice these qualities along with my students.