North Star Elementary School is helping students engage in learning in a different way, while improving their quality of life.
The Mindfulness Program is a unique initiative at the local Kindergarten to Grade 4 school. It focuses on getting students to take a moment to calm down and relax, to better their behaviour and their learning.
Students from North Star Elementary, along with principal Maureen Miller and wellness coach Carol Hendricken, demonstrated some of the exercises that students do through this program at the Dec. 14 Northern Lights Public Schools board meeting.
The first demonstration was a ‘mindful moment'. Students take deep breaths and listen to instructions on how to relax and to have a mindful body. The teacher will ring a chime and the students will focus on the sound of the chime.
“Each day we start our day at North Star with this. I do the announcement over the PA and I have been doing it for about a year. It sets the tone for our day,” said Miller. “We were experiencing a great deal of behaviour and upheaval last fall due to a number of different things. Carol had been working with our kids doing various mindful activities but we weren't doing them across the school, so we decided as a staff we would begin to do this as a school.”
Eventually, individual teachers began doing similar exercises in their own classrooms at different times. They wrote an article in the Canadian Associations Principals journal to talk about the program.
The school also has a created wellness room, which is devoted to the Mindfulness Program.
Another de-stress technique the students are taught, is to give themselves a hand massage using lotion. This reduces tension in their bodies and allows the students to relax and focus. It is also used for self-care.
To demonstrate how these mindful moments are working, stress check cards are used to measure how relaxed or stressed a student is.
After placing their finger on a specified spot on the card, if it stays black it means that they are tense. If it goes to green or blue it means they are calm. This test is completed both before and after their mindful moment.
“The kids are phenomenal at this. I have never seen adults be able to do what the kids are able to do,” said Hendricken.
Miller talked about one student who shared a story with her about how this has changed his life.
“We have one of our little people here today who said how much mindfulness has changed his little life. He spent a lot of time angry at a brother at home. By using his breathing and a ‘shark' technique that we use, it has helped him, in his words, ‘change his life',” said Miller.
North Star will be continuing this program throughout the school after the holiday break.
