Mind & Body News

Change can have many meanings across the developmental continuum.  Depending on your child’s age, you are going to have different tasks in order to help them manage and even accept change with interest and curiosity. Let’s look at some of the changes that might be occurring in your lives right now.  Maybe this has been your child’s first year of school, ever!

Here at school we have spent the entire year building community with each other. It’s cool to stand back and see the whole machine working together – at this point students know what they are doing, teachers are in their groove, friendships have been formed & most of us are feeling comfortable being here. All of this is occurring, however, at the same time we are experiencing so much stress & change.

Let’s be real: Trust has really taken a hit in the past few years.  A worldwide pandemic caused chaos and widespread miscommunication, leading to distrust in public institutions and each other.  Misinformation and disinformation swirling around can make it difficult to know if what we’re seeing and reading is real.

Leaves are falling, Halloween has passed, the field on campus is complete and we’re starting to have rainy, cool days.  Soon we will be caught up in the flurry of the holidays and before we know it, 2023 will arrive.  As always, things keep moving forward.

I believe that all of us choose to be here at the SLV Charter program because we want something different than the usual experience.  Whether your primary motivation is being able to do more educating at home, the opportunity for project-based learning & field trips, or incorporating art into education; a secondary gain here is the intrinsic social-emotional experience that comes with being a part of a small, flexible community.

This is my last letter to you all as your Charter Mental Health Specialist.  It’s difficult to decide what I’d like my last message to be to all of you, given that I’d like it to be something I feel is very important, and that I feel each of you is very important!  

It’s been a long couple of years since 2020!  All families have struggled in some form or fashion during these “unprecedented times” (that term has been used way more than I ever dreamed it would be).  Behind all of the smiles and conversations with other parents - there are...

There have been quite a few events and circumstances lately that have really tugged on my heart.  It would probably be easier for me to just run all of it through my left brain - where I use logic to “solve peoples’ problems”, avoiding my own uncomfortable feelings.  But, in my opinion, I would miss the richest part of being human. While sometimes empathy can feel painful,  we can connect with each other through the heart and ...

Feelings can do weird things to our thoughts sometimes, and we can start to create statements about ourselves or our situations that simply aren’t true (like, “I can’t do this” or “I just know the director regrets picking me”).  I have to “practice what I preach” and keep a healthy habit of watching these thoughts and “taking the heat out of them,” using my own DBT tools.

One of the most important things students can learn is to observe their thinking. If one can observe what they are thinking, then there becomes an opportunity to introduce new thoughts and quite literally “change our minds”. ...

Life is full of transitions - we wake up, and we carry out the tasks we need to transition out of sleep to the tasks of the day.  We are experiencing and reacting to transitions throughout the day until we end up back in bed again, our bodies transitioning into the stages of sleep. Meanwhile, there are bigger transitions happening - stages of life, family, and careers as well as emotional and cognitive growth spurts.  

Although there is seemingly an infinite variety of transitions through life, they all have a few things in common...

Recently, the pressure to wrap presents was too great to ignore. So, I sat on the floor in my bedroom and decided to “power wrap” as many as I could before going to pick up my kids from practice after school.  I fell in love with this new wrapping paper I found. It was a print of this elaborate etching, and even the texture of it was nice. I had to take my time to pick the ribbon, and suddenly I was in another headspace. I was carefully...