Hi Teachers,
Thanks for continuing to follow our journey. I will provide a source list for the last three lessons my students have posted!
We read the story Grandmothers Dreamcatcher by Becky Ray McCain. This story was a great introduction to the idea of dream catchers and how they protect us from bad dreams. We talked about how dream catchers could also help us with big and negative emotions. You can find the lesson idea and free printable from Ms. Lawhon here!
Students then wrote 10 negative emotions to be trapped inside their dreamcatchers as well as 10 positive emotions outside of their dream catchers. They glued these dream catchers in their happiness journals!
This lesson we started by watching the first 5 minutes of the video “Self Talk Creates Reality”. This is an extremely powerful motivational video that discusses the power and importance of self-talk.
Following this, we discussed the power of self-talk and what happens when we have positive self-talk vs what happens if we have a negative self-talk. Students then were asked to brainstorm their own positive self-talk mantras that they can use to protect themselves from the negative self-talk words overtaking their minds. They wrote these mantras on their self-talk shields.
You can find the positive self-talk shield lesson here. Students cut and put these into their happiness journals.
This lesson we focused on mindfulness and working towards taking care of our mind and learning to stay in the present moment. We started the lesson by watching this powerful video that suggests it only takes 10 minutes a day to take care of our minds.
This video encourages you to take 10 minutes each day to do nothing. No tv, reading, email, no thinking about the past or present just being present doing nothing.
This can be a very difficult past as our mind is used to whizzing away and stressing over the past or worrying about the future. Because this can be difficult for even adults as kids they need strategies to help them stay focused on the present moment. This is where I shared with my students the SA TA NA MA Meditation. This helps students to clear their minds and to bring mental balance. Here is a link to teaching students about the SA TA NA MA Meditation.
This video is also helpful to have students follow along with the words and music. This video is 11 minutes long so it is helpful to be able to work towards the full 10 minutes of doing nothing. This is very relaxing and the students enjoyed it!
Students then cut out pictures of the suggested hand movements to paste in their happiness journals to reference while doing the meditation.
The SA TA NA MA hand positions can be found here.
I hope some of these resources are helpful for the last few lessons that we did. Please email me if you have any questions about the lessons I would be happy to help in any way!
We will meet YOU at HAPPY!
Mrs. Degelman
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