ask me about monday, october 30, 2023

This week is Health and Wellness Week.  This week we will focus on mental health.  Today we focused on mindfulness.  We started our day with our Picture Talk which included photographs of people meditating in different places.  The children talked with their partners about the different settings and shared where they would like to meditate.  
We talked about taking care of our self.  We used the word self to remind ourselves of the importance of sleep, exercise, leisure (fun for you), and food.  Ask me to tell you what each letter of SELF stands for when we talk about taking care of our self.
We talked about what the word calm means and listened to snippets of music to determine which were calming music, and which were not.  Then we looked at different photographs to determine if the place would be a calm place or not a calm place for most people.  There was quite a debate over the photograph of Main Street, USA in Magic Kingdom at Disney World.  Many children insisted it would be a calm place.  Maybe in January on a super cold morning, but don't get your hopes up!
We participated in a one minute meditation break with the whole school, but then learned more about meditation with the Butterfly Hug video below.  The children took it very seriously.  I let them know that if they are feeling like they need to take a break to meditate if they are feeling overwhelmed or anxious that they can go to our calming corner and take a break.  Meditation is one option for what they can do there.  

We listened to the book Peaceful Piggy Meditation, by Kerry MacLean and learned more about meditating.  We saw a great example of when a good time to take a break and meditate, learned about what some things are you could bring to your meditation area, how to sit and finally what to do when you meditate.  This is something we will return to soon to help children begin to learn this self-soothing practice.

In Really Great Reading we began to put letters with sounds.  This is our phonics instruction now.  The program really emphasizes the upper and lower case letters, which is so important because we will be working on writing our names correctly to get rid of all those extra upper case letters.  We use capital and upper case interchangeably so the children get used to knowing both are for the "big" letters.  

In math we worked with one more and were able to quickly work through the lesson because the children understand this concept.  We also did another check on writing numbers in order from 1-10.  We had some reversals, but at this point that is developmentally appropriate and I will continue to encourage them to check their nametag that has the numbers on them to see if they are backwards.  

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe