We are now practising Mindfulness in nurture every day. Mindfulness is an approach that aims to further develop children’s life skills by helping them self-regulate and self-calm, pay attention to themselves and the world they live in and to reflect effectively on their relationships.
The key aims of mindfulness – these are to develop the following:
Attention – awareness of emotions, thoughts, feelings and greater concentration
Balance – time for you, time for family and friends, time for school and studying
Compassion -self acceptance, non-judgemental
The purpose of practising mindfulnes is to better understand ourselves and allow us to have feelings without allowing the feelings to control us and our actions. Mindfulness aims to help us relax, to remain calm, to give ourselves compassion and not constantly compare ourselves with others.
We play lots of game to learn about ourselves and each other; for example, games to help us become more aware of physical sensations, thoughts and feelings, to slow down, to focus on breathing, or simply to be able to accept a thought then let it go. We now practise mindfulness activities everyday in nurture. Sometimes these will last for two to three minutes and sometimes they may last for ten. The more we practise the better our skills become!
Reinforcing skills at home
The children can practise mindful activities in a range of contexts- including at home. The nurture children are given a Mindfulness Record on which they can record their own mindful minutes and reflect on how effective these are in terms of maintaining their overall wellbeing.
Our team building activity this week was to use different lengths of drainpipe to enable a ball to roll along them and land in a bucket at the end. Of course it wasn’t as simple as that… the bucket was further away than the length of the drainpipes put together. The children had to learn how to work together and comminucate to work towards the common goal of getting the ball in the bucket without it dropping to the floor.
Teambuilding activiites focus on collaboration and co-operation , not competition. When a team work together to solve a challenge everyone in the group wins and all children have a positive experience. The skills learned from being part of a team are essential in everyday life in school and at home.
We took advantage of the lovely weather today and ventured up to the Secret Garden. We played ‘Winter Dragon’ a great co-operative game and then took part in a teambuilding exercise – making a den! It was lovely to see the children working together, practising their communication skills, judging when to listen to others and accept their propsals and when to press forward with their own ideas. All the children tried really hard and were proud of their achievements. To finish off the afternoon we made new Tree Bogarts from clay to live in the garden. Do you like them?
Today we talked about trying to do something that was really hard, so hard that you felt like you wanted to give up. Sometimes it’s hard to understand why you should keep trying to do something that seems quite hard at first.But learning to do new things makes life more interesting and makes us more interesting people. Learning anything new often takes lots of practice.
We had a go at making an origami finger game. We didn’t get it right first time and we felt a bit frustrated , sad and cross, But that didn’t stop us from trying again. We kept telling ourselves ‘I can do it!’ Miss Woods and Mrs Mills encouraged us and told us they believed we could succeed and after lots of practice did!
No matter what you are doing, when you know you have tried your best then you can be really proud of yourself.