Hello families! Welcome to the 2019-20 school year! I hope you all had a wonderful restorative Summer.
This is a very special year for me because both of my children will be joining SLVUSD Charter for the first time (one in Nature Academy and the other in Fall Creek Homeschool). I will have two hats this year: one as a counselor and another as a Charter parent. Hopefully, it will help for you to know that I’m walking with all of you Charter parents arm-in-arm as we help navigate these educational waters. I am here for consultation support or just as a good listener if need be.
With my counselor hat on…..I’m so happy to be back in the Charter “hive” and getting creative about classroom activities. Over the Summer I learned a lot from my clients and also had time to reflect on what I learned last year and what I believe our students and our world at large need for their mental health. I believe we need to go back and start with the basics: awareness of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.
We live in a culture of distraction from our basic emotional needs. When we feel uncomfortable, we are confronted with a multitude of ways to ignore and escape from the way we feel. Sometimes, we can even lose contact completely with the truth of our feelings and we become submerged or lost in behaviors of escape- social media, video games, shopping, partying, gossiping, excessive eating or exercise, and so many other behaviors that can become compulsive. If we do not have conscious contact with our feelings, thoughts or behaviors, we become hijacked and no longer have a choice to create change.
Me, You and the World is our theme for this year. It all begins with awareness.
Feelings can be uncomfortable. Negative thoughts can hurt. Behaviors can cause problems for ourselves and others. But without awareness, we are simply trying to force a change without understanding our underlying needs.
I hope to have some fun with the students in class as we explore their emotional intelligence and offer some tools for making new choices. I have this funny slideshow where they will be asked to figure out what each person is feeling based on their facial expression in the slide that I can’t wait to share with them.
We will spend October exploring emotions, November with thought patterns and December with behaviors.
Things to practice with your children at home: try to “stop, look around and breathe”. We stop what we’re doing, look around internally and externally, making a mental list of what we are observing, how they are feeling, and take some cleansing breaths. Take so real time to do this. For breathing, younger children can use words like “sad, happy, mad, jumpy, bouncy, new, imaginary, my favorite, etc” and then imagine they’re “blowing bubbles” as they exhale, or put their hands on their tummy and imagine “blowing up a balloon”, watching it rise and fall. Older children can describe their feelings with words, colors and images, describe their surroundings in as much detail as possible, and then draw a “figure 8” with their finger and breath in around one loop and exhale around the next loop (lazy 8 breathing).
The 3x3 is another great tool that is fun and easy for slowing down and paying attention. They list three things they experience with three different senses (three things I see, three things I hear, three things I feel). For an added twist, have them try and pay attention to more than one at a time!
As the year progresses, we will expand our awareness of “Me” into “You” by looking at who we are in our friendships, our communities and eventually..”the World”. We will try and zoom in on what kinds of environments we provide for ourselves and others’ growth and wellbeing. It’s a topic that was very big for me in graduate school. I learned that the learning in our classroom came from what we all brought to it. And, isn’t that true wherever we go? And in any community - humans and other creatures as well? It should be a fun year with lots of classroom social explorations!
I hope to see all of you and your children around their campuses and classrooms and that we all support each other for a great year!
Robin Bates, LMFT