Bright Idea: Bathroom Sign Out

Use the dry erase to write their name on the plate when they leave the room. You can also do this on the chalk board or white board if you are in as a TTOC for a day, or use coloured masking tape to section off part of the board for this purpose.

I have also had specific items, such as a stuffed animal or toy that they put on their desk when they leave the room.

The key here is that you as the teacher, need to know where all students are at all times and if there was an emergency you want to easily identify who is out of the classroom and where.



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Making Room for Wonder in Children's Lives

Yes, focusing is important, but so is daydreaming, wondering, reflecting. Here's why. http://owl.li/uTMZ1

In her new book Thrive, Arianna Huffington writes of the importance of "making room" for wonder -- a change in how we measure success that would have an especially great impact on the lives of our children.

Right now, parents and teachers expend a lot of energy getting kids to pay attention, concentrate, and focus on the task in front of them. What we adults don't do, according to University of Southern California education professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, is teach children the value of the more diffuse mental activity that characterizes our inner lives: wondering, remembering, reflecting.

Yet this kind of introspection is crucial to our mental health, to our relationships, and to our emotional and moral development. And it promotes the skill parents and teachers care so much about: the capacity to focus on the world outside our heads.

...

Ironically, a lack of time to daydream may even hamper kids' capacity to pay attention when they need to. The ability to become absorbed in our own thoughts is linked to our ability to focus intently on the world outside, research indicates. In one recent neuro-imaging study, for example, participants alternated periods of mental rest with periods of looking at images and listening to sounds. The more effectively the neural regions associated with "looking in" were activated during rest and deactivated while attending to the visual and auditory stimuli, the more engaged were the brain's sensory cortices in response to sights and sounds. 

Read the whole article here.

Mindfulness and SEL improving student achievement

 

Many teachers in Coquitlam have had 'MindUp' training and having been a TTOC in classes that use this mindfulness in class, I can say that it can be very beneficial. A colleague shared this article and I wanted to share a piece of it and the link to the full article for further reading if you are interested.

Schools across the country are beginning to use mindfulness as part of an effort to address the social and emotional needs of children, improving student achievement in the process.

“Before we can teach a kid how to academically excel in school, we need to teach him how to have stillness, pay attention, stay on task, regulate, make good choices,” said Larochette. “We tell kids be quiet, calm yourself down, be still. We tell them all these things they need in the classroom, but we’re not teaching them how to do that.”

It makes sense doesn't it? Less time managing behaviour as students learn to self regulate and use skills to help them learn.

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