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Our friends at Attitudes in Reverse have shared fantastic coping strategies with us after school and at the Wellness Fair. Here is a link to one of the great resources we handed out and discussed. Take time to focus on the healthy coping strategies we have shared, like mindful coloring, meditation, healthy snacking, and yoga. AIR recommends the following tips for stressed out teens:
We presented some of our stress coping strategies to teachers at High School North today. The teachers were really excited to learn how they could use mindful coloring, gratitude journals, meditation, and yoga to help their students.
What an amazing experience! The Wellness Fair was held on Feb 26 and we are still exhausted and energized at the same time from all of our efforts. We had over 180 people attend our fair to learn different stress relieving and coping strategies. It was exciting to see so many people there and we will always remember all of the support we received from parents, teachers, administrators, and students. We are sending out HUGE thank yous to EVERYONE for all of the help we received in making this event happen! Meditation, deep breathing, and simple yoga postures can help alleviate stress. Better yet, these simple techniques are easy for you to use at any time and in any place – during the school day, at home, or out in public! Join Mrs. Scott for one hour after school and take away some valuable information that can help you be calmer, more focused, and happy! Join us on Thursday, March 3rd 3-4pm.
Also, we have a nature walk along with the Environmental Club on Tuesday of next week, the 23rd. This way, you will learn the benefits of being outside along with friends! It will be a walk in session, and if you are interested, please join us! As I said in the previous post, we are also hosting a Drum Circling session next week on Thursday! It will be in the music room upstairs from 3-4 pm. Ready to bang? Let's go! Hello all! We are excited to say that we are planning a drum circling event taking place after school at CMS. We will draw from previous knowledge from our presentations at Faculty Meetings and PD day to help out with our planning, and it will be from 3 to 4 pm. Get ready to drum, everyone! A music teacher from our school will be supervising this, as well as a few members of NuYu. It will happen sometime next week, the date is still to be determined. So, if you are a teacher or student, come join us at the after school event next week at CMS from 3 to 4 in the music room, specific date to be determined. I will update this blog post as soon as possible. Also, join us at the Wellness Fair! Information and a sign up are both posted on this site under Menu. If you've read all the previous posts before this, you would know about the Wellness Fair. And within the Wellness Fair, we are going to be packaging care packages as a volunteering project to reduce stress. So what does that mean? A fundraiser!
We are collecting the following items for the Wellness Fair: 1. Cough Drops 2. Pairs of Socks (size doesn't matter) 3. Mouthrinse (large bottle) 4. Toothpaste/toothbrush 5. Crackers (box) 6. Tissues 7. Face Wipes 8. Lip Balm I know that many of you who read this can't donate, but knowing about it won't hurt! The Wellness Fair is on February 26th, and that is also when the fundraiser ends. Volunteering helps reduce stress because it creates a sense of empathy. If you visit our previous blog post, it talks about other ways to reduce stress, which are also going to be at the Wellness fair which is from 6 to 9 pm on February 26th. Yay! On February 8th, we presented at High School North, across the road from Community Middle School, to teachers from all around the district. We organized our team into six groups: mindful coloring, yoga, meditation, time management, volunteering and empathy, and relationship skills. Each of these groups is a crucial part of social-emotional health, and in each presentation, we offered tips on reducing stress. In order to help both students and teachers to better identify and manage their emotions, as well as to have a moment of relaxation in a busy day, we led sessions on simple yoga and deep breathing. The goal of this was to momentarily calm the body and mind. Yoga puts all the other things going on in your life on “pause” and allows you to simply let go. We trained the teachers on chair yoga, as to make it easy to infuse a few moves into their classroom routine, and disused good times to do so, such as at the start of the day, or before a test. This was received with an encouragingly open mind from the teachers, many of whom said they would either try it privately or share it with their class. Students told us that these simple stretches provided a chance to move after being stuck in a desk all day. “It brings clarity”, the yoga club told us. “I can focus better after spending some time in a yoga pose”. Journaling: In order to promote self-awareness, we led sessions on gratitude journaling for gaining perspective and meditation to care for the mind. Our group also taught others about art journaling in the classroom and to de-stress at home. Journaling is an excellent tool that reframes your mindset, gets you back into a healthy point of view, and leaves you ready to take on the world. We found that everyone experienced a calming of the mind, body, and spirit.. Volunteering: Volunteering provides perspective and helps you feel like you are contributing to your society. We watched and discussed Dr. Brene Brown’s empathy video and brainstormed ways teachers can encourage their classes to participate in community service to develop a sense of empathy. Empathy is a win-win: you feel better and the person you’re comforting feels better. Also, volunteering is fun in general! You meet new friends, develop social skills, and create bonds. The Golden Rule that we were all taught in elementary school still rings true in middle school and in life. We need treat others as we would like to be treated. Empathy is a “life ready” trait. Time Management: Whether being distracted on our devices, suffering from priority paralysis, or simply not efficiently planning our time, we all feel overwhelmed when the deadline arrives. We presented sessions on changing our mindset to work on our projects a little each day and how can we use technology to help us stay organized. We also lead our participants through a bridge building exercise in which you list out your current situation, your ideal situation, and the actions you need to take in order to bridge the gap. This helps people focus on actionable steps toward success and can be used by students and adults. Deadlines are a reality and we are helping our peers find ways to meet them without procrastination taking over. Relationship Skills: Friends, family, and peers. They’re everywhere in life. How we react around these people decides the type of relationship we have with them. We researched how to build and maintain good relationships. How did we do this? First, we organized drum circles for students and teachers. We also played games like UNO and Monopoly. If you don’t have the ability to organize a drum circle in your school, you can still take the time every once and a while to play a board or card game. These games exercise the mind and help build relationships. We all benefit from the release of oxytocin in the brain when bonding with others. Many middle school students lack the skill set to build strong relationships and that is why we chose to organize bonding activities. There are more pictures of our presentations on the site, in our digital scrapbook. We hope to spread the word further by presenting to even more teachers, and try to share more tips to students and teachers alike.
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