This morning, there was a fascinating piece on the radio about the effects of deep breathing. I use breathing myself to help lower my heart rate, settle my nerves and focus my awareness in important or stressful situations, so this story resonated for me personally. Its relevance to so much of what we are working on at school and especially the topics we are exploring in our class made me realise I HAD to share it with my students.<\/p>\n
We try to help kids (and colleagues) use knowledge about our brains to be better at understanding emotions, recognising and regulating stress levels, and at understanding and solving problems. Being in the middle of a novel whose main character frequently experiences (and is overcome by) the physical and emotional effects of anger & stress, we have a perfect opportunity to apply this story from the radio to our discussions about our novel. It also helps us work on questions we\u2019ve been exploring in health, PE, science & math. I will be curious to see how we are able to use the information we are finding out about the body and the brain (e.g. about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems) to help us connect our learning in class to our learning out in the rest of the world and to our understanding of ourselves and others.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019d like to listen yourself, you can find the story at http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/player\/play\/2697746396<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning, there was a fascinating piece on the radio about the effects of deep breathing. I use breathing myself to help lower my heart rate, settle my nerves and focus my awareness in important or stressful situations, so this … Continue reading