This week the class was introduced to the Mind Up Curriculum, a series of lesons and activities to help students focus their attention, improve their self regulation skills, build resilience to stress and develop a positive mindset in both school and life.
We learned some pretty neat facts about our brains (e.g. our brains never stop changing and growing no matter how old we are!) and we learned about three major parts: The prefrontal cortex, the amydgala and the hippocampus. The prefrontal cortex processes information and is the decision-making part of the brain. However, when we are feeling sad, angry, anxious or stressed, our amygdala prevents information from being sent to the prefrontal cortex and we are faced with the fight, flight or freeze response. This is why sometimes we make poor decisions when we are feeling those emotions.
As a class we brainstormed some ideas that we could use to calm ourselves down when we are feeling sad, angry, anxious or stressed.
Then we read the story, “What Do You Do With A Problem?”. It was a great reminder that even though we are all bound to have problems we get to choose how to react to those problems. We can either make our problem bigger (e.g. giving up, yelling, hitting, name calling, lying, etc.) or we can make our problem smaller (e.g. thinking it through, talking about it, taking deep breaths, apologizing, learning from our mistakes, taking responsibility, etc.). The class agreed that we want to keep our problems small 😊
