Mindfulness: What is it and why should child care programs practice it

Mindfulness is the state of being aware of your own mind, at any given moment. It means to pay attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and without judgement.  Significantly, mindfulness is a strong tool in regulating a child’s (or adult’s) nervous system - taking their body out of fight-or-flight and into the calmer, more regulated rest-and-digest.

There are three parts to the brain that we are helping children learn about: the prefrontal cortex (the thinking part), which helps us focus, decide, compute, analyze and reason and helps to moderate social behaviour. It only receives information when the

amygdala is calm.

The Amygdala, which is the fight, flight and freeze part of the brain (the impulsive part), blocks information from going to the prefrontal cortex so that we can react instantly. It can not differentiate between stress and emergency, so can cause reactions

that are impulsive.

The Hippocampus (the library), which creates, stores and processes the facts and memories that the prefrontal cortex passes on.

When we are calm, we are able to access the prefrontal cortex, but when we are stressed or feel negative, the amygdala inhibits our ability to think and learn.

The repeated action of focusing attention such as what occurs during mindfulness activities creates and strengthens neuron connections, particularly within the prefrontal cortex. Essentially, mindfulness makes the “thinking” part of your brain grow.

What is mindfulness in the classroom?

What can early childhood classrooms do to support mindfulness in the classroom?  At SSOCC our educators are all trained in the MindUp program, ensuring that all educators are on the same page about why and when mindfulness activities occur. 

Activities that SSOCC programs introduce to the children include:

Mindful Moment - using our chime, the children completely still their bodies, and listen intently to the chime as it rings and fades, remaining still and listening until the chime is no longer audible.

Body-Freeze and multi-modal reading - activities that require translating over different parts of the brain (for example, reading a card and physically posing what the card says; hearing a sound and drawing the image of what makes the sound) improves the functioning of the prefrontal cortex

Deep breathing - deep and slow ‘belly breathing’

Mood-meter - being inwardly mindful as to the level of pleasant emotion and energy that is being felt at a given moment

Labelling brain parts and connected behaviours - research suggests that as children are able to verbally label emotions and parts of the brain, they begin to feel more in-control of their emotions, essentially, emotions become less mysterious!

Literature connections - using books that allow us to discuss impulsive and thoughtful actions and optimistic and pessimistic thought patterns

Gratitude Journal - reflecting on personal gratitude up to three times a day helps to reduce impulsive actions, reduce stress and anxiety and consequently, improve focused and thoughtful actions

Recognizing collaboration - calling for teamwork, bringing children’s attention to how we are helping each other helps to reduce impulsive actions and increase focused and thoughtful

actions

Focusing senses - activities that require intensely using one sense (for example, differentiating between two scents; listening to a portion of music to hear one instrument)

Where can I learn more?

The MindUp program is a cost-effective training program (also used by the Vancouver School Board!) that can be used to train individual educators or teams.  Learn more at https://www.mindup.org/