My students need opportunities and strategies to self-regulate and prepare their minds and bodies for optimal learning. I need Awakened Mind System, Portable Docking for iPod, and Yoga Calm for Children to enable me to do this.
$286 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
I work in a school with incredible diversity: linguistically, culturally, and economically. About 75% of our students qualify for free and reduced lunch. They bring joy, curiosity, and energy to our school each and every day. Unfortunately, they also bring stress, anxiety, and worry.
As a classroom teacher, I know that many of my students are stressed.
For some, the stress is simply living in our fast-paced, media-saturated, multi-tasking world. For others, the stress is is surviving in extremely challenging, even traumatic, home environments and life circumstances. I have also realized that student stress frequently inhibits their ability to learn.
Before we can teach a kid how to academically excel in school, we need to teach him or her how to have stillness, pay attention, stay on task, regulate, make good choices. We tell kids be quiet, calm yourself down, be still. We tell them all these things they need in the classroom, but we are not teaching them how to do that. I would like to change that.
My Project
My students need opportunities and strategies to self-regulate and prepare their minds and bodies for optimal learning. I need Awakened Mind System, Portable Docking for iPod, and Yoga Calm for Children to enable me to do this. Studies of mindfulness programs in schools have found that regular practice even just a few minutes per day improves student self-control and increases their classroom participation, respect for others, happiness, optimism, and self-acceptance levels. It can help reduce absenteeism and suspensions too. A mindfulness practice helps reduce activity in the amygdala, the brain's emotional center responsible for fear and stress reactions.
With your support I would like to provide daily opportunities for my students to build these self-regulation skills. I would like to engage student in mindfulness activities first thing in the morning as a way to help them check their worries at the door and prepare them for a productive day of learning. Additionally, often kids come back from lunch recess with high levels of frustration. After lunch I would like to have students engage in a few minutes of yoga to calm their bodies and prepare them for focused learning in the afternoon.
Your support and generosity will help provide us with the knowledge, skills, and resources to begin this critically important practice that according to recent research will improve achievement in BOTH life and school.
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Dyslin and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
