Mind & Body News

Well, we made it through the first trimester!  I’ve enjoyed walking around our beautiful campus and spending time with all of the students in various ways: from talking, playing some basketball, four square, Hoola Hoops, to making slime at the picnic tables!  Watching and interacting with them helps me put my thumb on the pulse of our community.  I get to hear, see and feel what’s happening in their day-to-day interactions with their peers, teachers, and staff. All of their boundaries, forms of communication and interactions, relationships with teachers and peers are changing and...

We are already moving into October!  Now that students are getting into the school year, I am seeing so many students and families confronted with challenges - academic, emotional, relationship, and cognitively based. 

Recently I was confronted with my own parenting challenge when

This morning, I watched the families walk their children to their first day of school for The Nature Academy 6th grade class. The kids waited patiently outside of the classroom, squirming around to contain the many feelings I imagined they were experiencing.  It’s amazing how many emotions we can experience at the same time!  Rosie Hope finished up with...

After all of the months sheltering-in-place, evacuations and power outages, we are finally beginning to see things open up and return to some fraction of in-person school. We are all “rebuilding” our in-person connections to each other as our communities are slowly opening up.  So many of us have spent a large portion of our time connecting digitally, which required us...

Wow. Really? I guess you know how I’m going to start this article to you - with a big “we are going through some major craziness” statement!  There have been moments when I’ve had to narrow my mind to a single task at a time in order to not get overwhelmed!  I’ve also had to practice cutting myself some slack - we are ALL...

This is a season of many emotions and experiences - many that seem opposed to each other (but when we feel all of them we realized that they actually fit together nicely).  Often we get so wound up caring for others and tending to our highest expectations, that self-care takes a backseat to all of the other things on our priority list.

I looked up “home” in the ol’ Mariam-Webster dictionary, and the first definition is: “one's place of residence”.  The second definition is: “the social unit formed by a family living together” and the third is: “a familiar or usual setting: congenial environment and also: the focus of one's domestic attention”.  It seems that in times like these when our houses are threatened or destroyed and we are faced with raw feelings that we may have never or rarely felt before, many of us are left thinking about what our own definition of “home” is.

Resources for you to refer to over the summer or anytime, if you choose.YouTube videos for Charter Students by Robin Bates

NOTE: these can be found under our Mind and Body tab as well.
https://charter-slvusd.edlioschool.com/apps/pages/mind-body-videos

Throughout these years -  all of the circle check-ins, field trips, overnights, beach days, charter plays, craft fairs and events, lunch bunches, celebrations, -all the work we’ve put in to creating this tight-knit charter community has really paid off. We work hard on these relationship connections so that we can still hold each other up through the most difficult circumstances, and why we always feel attached to our Charter family, no matter how physically distant we may be.  During a pandemic emergency, we get a glimpse of just how connected we all are. This is why community building and social-emotional learning is truly woven into the core of what we all believe is best for our children to support their growth and learning. I believe our collective Charter Wise Mind is working!

Hello from Strangeville, families!

During Spring break, one night my family and I sat down to watch “The Martian”. I’d seen it a time or two before, but given the circumstances we are all in, this time the message of the movie really struck me. Here’s a guy, stuck in a strange world, inside of his little habitat, solving problems day by day to survive and get to his eventual long term goal of reuniting with his crew. Sound familiar?