Take a break

Try some mindfulness and breathing to make a stressful day less stressful.

• Sit in a comfortable position. Close your eyes or look down.
• Pay close attention to your breathing. Feel the air come in thru your nose, then fill your chest, and your belly. Calmly and slowly, let the breath leave your belly, then your chest, and finally your nose.
• Keep your shoulders dropped and relaxed. Think about the air coming into your body and the air going out.
• Bring your attention back to your breath, if your mind tries to think about other things.
• Notice your stomach rising and falling. Let your belly be soft and relaxed.
• Open your eyes slowly and take a slow, deep breath.

More Tips to Start the School Year

Homework-staying motivated
When your child gets home from school or after-school care, he/she might want to relax for a little while or maybe just jump right in and work. If he feels restless when doing his homework suggest that he gets up and moves once in awhile to a new spot. For example he might finish his spelling at the kitchen table and then read on the porch. A planned break can also give him a second wind (a snack or a short walk).
Building Relationships
One way to help your child develop relationship skills is to enourage him/her to identify feelings. As you watch your favorite television show, movie or read a book with your child, have them write down all the feelings they see and hear the characters express. Compare the list with your list.
See how many feelings you label the same. Notice how many feeling words you both think of.
You can also discuss how the different characters handled their feelings. Talk about their decisions on how to deal with their feelings.

Welcome

Welcome to the 2014-2015 School

Hopefully you and your child(ren) are slowly but surely getting back into the school routine. I would like to start my blog this year with a few basic suggestions for getting off on the right foot.
Attendance
Being in school every day means your child will not miss out on learning. Try your best to schedule family trips and appointments outside of school hours, although we all know we all can not get into that 4:00 p.m. appointment time.
Celebrate Progress
Suggest that your child create a fun reminder of all the things he/she has acomplished. Try covering a container with construction paper and label it, "I did it". He/she can write each success on a slip of paper and put it in the container. If they are feeling discouraged it would be a great time to read their accomplishments in the container.
Have a meal together
You may have heard its important for families to eat a meal together. If you work evenings maybe it could be breakfast. On a week-end try a picnic lunch.

Let's have a great year!!

SECOND QUARTER

The second quarter has started for the Unified Arts. The new semester brings new classes for all of us. The classes for Guidance are now; Carney, Rayner-Cyr, Longchamp, Renner, Sato, Rogers, Chittenden, Taylor, O'Neill, and Schroeder. I will be teaching the same lessons that are posted for the first semester classes.

Tools to Help Calm the Brain

Now that we understand alittle bit about the brain, how do we calm the brain so it has time to process something we hear, taste,smell, or feel before it responds?  How do we create a buffer between the input and the response or how do we go from a fuzzy brain to a clear one? A fuzzy brain is also referred to as a "puppy brain".
At the end of the first semester we started a toolbox of skills to calm the brain. The students are keeping a list of skills they are learning. This will go home the end of the second semester that they have guidance. Some examples are; counting to ten, exercising, doing a finger labyrinth, coloring a circular Mandala, smelling an aroma we enjoy(we tried the scent of an orange), and taking three deep belly breaths. I can not emphasize the importance of the breath. It not only calms the mind, but as an added bonus lowers blood pressure and heart rate. When breathing is deliberately regulated, the brain is primed to think first and then plan a response.  

Continued Care of the Brain-Meet Some Key Players

We certainly do not have time to delve into a deep study of the brain in Guidance, but we can meet some key players involved in our attention and focus as students in school.  The amygdala is a pair of almond shaped structures that reacts to fear, danger, and threat. The amygdala regulates our emotional state by acting as the brain's gatekeeper. When a student is in a positive emotional state, the amygdala sends incoming information on to the conscious, thinking brain. When a student is in a negative state, the amygdala prevents the input from passing along, basically blocking higher level thinking and judgment. Therefore there is an automatic response of flight, fight, or freeze from the brain. Examples might be, "I can't do this" or " I won't do this".
The hippocampus assists in managing our response to fear and threats and is a storage vault of memory and learning.Information is fed to the prefrontal cortex-the learning, reasoning, and thinking center of the brain. This area of the brain controls our decision making, focuses our attention, and allows us to learn to read, write, compute, analyze, predict, comprehend, and interpret-phew, that's alot to do.
If the amygdala triggers an alarm we go into fight, flight, or freeze without letting the parts of the brain that think about something  do their job. We also are unble to send information into the storage banks , the hippocampus and the the prefrontal cortex. How do we calm our brains in a stressful situation so we may store information and make good decisions? Stayed tuned as we next develop a toolbox to help our brains to work as best as they possibly can.

Learning to Love Your Brain or The Care and Feeding of the Brain

This semester the fourth and fifth grades are learning about the brain. The brain is nearly 3 pounds of gooey, slimey, gelatinous stuff that smells like blue cheese. It is grey and light pink, and about the size of two fists side by side. It is the control room that directs almost all your activities: thinking, moving, feeling, talking, and just keeping alive. It works 24 hours a day. So how do we take care of it and help it to work well. If you have a fourth or fifth grader in the first semester Guidance class ask them. Here are a few ideas: the brain needs blood, oxygen, good food, sleep, exercise, to be kept safe from head injuries(helmets, seat belts), water and happiness. Yes, happiness helps our brains work better. Two ways we can boost our happiness is with gratitude and with optimistic thinking. Each student made three links of things they are grateful for and combined made a very long chain, a chain of gratitude. Thinking on the "bright side" of life also is a happiness booster, so keep your sunnyside up and see the glass as half full not half empty.