Discover

Overview

Stage One - Desired Results

Stage Two - Assessment Evidence

• Skills

  • focusing

  • physical awareness

  • emotional awareness

  • self-regulation

  • self-care

  • resilience

• Context

  • Education: Practicing mindful breathing enhances the ability to maintain focus.

  • Neuroscience: Neuroplasticity from practicing mindfulness forges positive pathways in the brain.

  • Psychology: Using mindful breathing in challenging situations helps people calm down to make smart decisions.

  • Physiology: Increased oxygen intake can calm the nervous system.

  • Contemplative traditions: Modern day breathing exercises relate to pranayama breathing and vipassana meditation.

Stage Three - Learning Plan

INQUIRE (5 min)

Begin the lesson by refreshing students’ minds of what they learned about during the previous lesson.

Raise your hand if you would like to share what we learned about during last Kindfulness class. Hint: it’s something we’ve been doing since we were born.

Call on 1-3 students.

We paused, then breathed slowly and deeply. Why might it be useful to use to breathe like that?

Call on 1-3 students.

Breathing slows down heart rate, circulates blood around body, ____….

Clarify any confusion so that students have a solid understanding of breathing.

We’re going to talk about another way we can take care of ourselves and make good decisions. It’s called being mindful, which is the opposite of being mindless. Thumbs up if you’ve heard of the words “mindful” or “mindless” before.

Assess students

Raise your hand if you’d like to share what you think it means to be mindful or mindless.

Call on 1-3 students. 

Being mindful means being aware of what is happening right now. Being mindless is the opposite — not paying attention to what is happening right now. An example of when I am being mindless is when I brush my teeth. I have done it so many times in my life that I don’t think about it as I do it; I just do it out of habit. That is being mindless. I am mindful when I am concentrating on where I am and what I am doing. 

Raise your hand if you would like to share a time when you’ve been mindful or mindless.

That’s when I make new discoveries about what is happening as it’s happening. When I want to be mindful, I ask myself: “what can I discover?”.

EXPERIENCE (5 min)

Pausing to breathe helps us be more mindful because it allows our bodies to calm down. It also allows our minds to calm down/settle. We’re going to do an activity to see what our minds look like before mindful breathing, then after mindful breathing. Let’s pretend this jar here is a mind.

Hold up water-filled jar for students to see.

What should we name this mind? Let’s give it a human name.

Let students come up with name or use something simple, like Kyle, that is not the name of a student in the class.

Ok, _____. So just like us, ____ has lots of thoughts swirling through his head every second. We’re going to use different colored glitter to show ___’s different thoughts. I’m going to invite several of you to come up and choose a color glitter to represent a thought that’s been on your mind today. Add a little glitter if you have been thinking that thought a little bit, and a lot of glitter if you’ve been thinking that thought a lot. Raise your hand if you would like to come up, share your thought with the class, then add some glitter to the jar to represent that thought in ___’s mind.

Invite a student up. Assist as necessary with adding glitter. If you don’t have immediate volunteers, you can do the first one yourself as an example.

Great job. Raise your hand if you would like to come up next.

Repeat several times until at least 5 different students have shared their thoughts and added glitter.

Thanks for sharing. Now we’re going to see what ___’s mind looks like when he/she is feeling overwhelmed.

Shake the jar.

Let’s all practice being mindful of ___’s mind by being aware of what is happening to it and asking ourselves the mindful question: what can I discover?

Raise your hand if you’d like to share something you’ve discovered about what is happening to ___’s overwhelmed mind right now.

Call on 1-3 students.

___ is having lots of different thoughts at the same time. They are swirling around and bumping into each other. This is ___’s mind’s way of signaling to him that he is feeling overwhelmed. Thumbs up if you have felt like this at some point.

Raise your hand if you’d like to share when that was.

Thanks for sharing. 

Raise your hand if you’d like to share some advice for ___ of what he/she could do to calm his mind and feel less overwhelmed.

Call on 1-3 students.

Great, we can pause and breathe. Let’s practice doing this with ____. Everyone sit in Practice Position with backs straight, feet flat, and eyes closed, and we’ll breathe together for 30 seconds, with the Pause Chime at the beginning and the end.

Assist students in getting in Practice Position. Ring the Pause Chime and start the timer.

Breathe in…. and out…. in… and out…

Ring Pause Chime. Hold up ___’s mind.
 

REFLECT (_ min)

Take a few seconds to observe what is happening in ___’s mind right now. Silently ask yourself the mindful question: what can I discover?

SHARE (_ min)

Raise your hand if you’d like to share something you discovered about ___’s mind?

Call on 1-3 students.

Great discoveries. All the same thoughts are still in ___’s mind. They didn’t disappear, but they do look different. Instead of all the thoughts swirling around, bumping into each other, and overwhelming ___ by making it difficult to think clearly, the thoughts are all settled at the bottom in one place. This is what being mindful looks like. Pausing to breathe allowed ___ to calm down his mind and see his thoughts clearly. That’s what the sayings “seeing clearly” or "settle down" refers to. We can make wise choices when we are mindful, settled, and clear-headed like this.

Did anyone make a discovery about their own minds during this activity? Raise your hand if you would like to share.

Raise your hand if you’d like to share a time when you might use mindful pausing and breathing to feel less overwhelmed in your own life.

Call on 1-3 students.

Great. We’ll keep practicing these ways to understand ourselves and make good decisions.

EXTEND (_ min)

In-class or homework activity that further advances the development of Enduring Understandings and/or allows students to apply their learning in more in-depth ways