Drinking coffee, skimming email, writing a report, checking our texts — we can get it all done and then some! Or so we think. In the world of 24/7 cyber-living, we watch TVs with our phones in hand, study the newspaper with our laptops open and interrupt dinner to answer “just one text.” Unfortunately, all […]
The Brain: The SMARTest Technology We’re Not Teaching
When I asked the Eighth Grade students at the Madison Junior School how many of them felt nervous before tests, almost all the hands in the room went up. (There were 40 kids in the room.) How many of you feel like you can’t remember what you learned? (Same amount of hands.) Do you freeze? […]
Mindfulness Increases Math Scores & Improves Focus
Time Magazine reported the benefits of mindfulness education for kids in their January 26 and February 3, 2015 issues. Time highlighted recent studies that measured a 15% improvement in math scores and 24% decrease in aggression in 4th and 5th graders in its January 26th edition. Time‘s February 5th infographic, pictured at the far right below, […]
Mindfulness Helps with PARCC Testing
I started working with the 8th graders at the Madison Junior School, a few weeks before they began their PARCC testing. We began with an overview of mindfulness and the first skill set in the Mindful Schools curriculum: listening. The kids closed their eyes and listened to the sound of the singing bowl as it […]
Mindfulness Changes the Structure of our Brains
Mindfulness classes actually reshape kids’ brains so that the parts of the brain that respond to “anxiety and stress are getting smaller and the parts of the brain that lead you to feel calmer and manage our impulses and feel kinder to yourself and other people are actually growing.” Katherine Weare of Exeter University in […]