Being With Our Feelings - A Mindful Approach to Wellbeing for Children: A Teaching Toolkit


Book Description

To get the full Being With Our Feelings experience, this book can be purchased alongside the storybooks. All books can be purchased together as a set, Being With Our Feelings: Guidebook and Four Storybooks Set, 978-0-367-77231-4. A vital resource, full of practical advice for developing and nurturing children’s emotional, mental and physical wellbeing, this toolkit offers a range of easily implementable, creative options to teach young people how to be with their feelings, themselves and each other with acceptance, kindness and compassion. Using storytelling, movement, drama, art, spoken word, guided meditations and providing plenty of photocopiable and visual aids, the Being With Our Feelings toolkit is a must-have resource for ensuring a mindful, embodied approach to wellbeing. Centred around the teaching of seven key principles carefully designed to develop healthy relationships with our feelings, this toolkit provides a comprehensive and progressive framework (suggested for Years 3-6), as well as the flexibility to suit the needs of any school, group or individual, Each key is unpacked through a main teaching activity with clear teaching points, followed by mindful reflections, creative explorations and opportunities to apply learning using the accompanying storybooks. With opportunities for assessing understanding and progression throughout, this toolkit follows a TEARS structure – teaching and exploring, applying, reviewing and self-evaluating. Being With Our Feelings encourages: increased emotional, mental, and physical wellbeing more conscious behaviour, reduced bullying and healthier relationships greater compassion, empathy and kindness an understanding of integrity and values a diverse feelings culture an established feelings language a space for freedom and creativity of expression including using imagery, sound and movement all-inclusive wellbeing rituals and routines that embody the energy and sensation of feelings Whether you are a teacher or school leader looking to develop your wellbeing curriculum or a caring adult looking to help children to be with all their feelings in a healthy way, this accessible book will enable you to support children’s enhanced development through a greater sense of self-worth and acceptance.




The Red String: Exploring the Energy of Anger and Other Strong Emotions


Book Description

To get the full Being With Our Feelings experience, this book can be purchased alongside the guidebook. All books can be purchased together as a set, Being With Our Feelings: Guidebook and Four Storybooks Set, 978-0-367-77231-4. Using a red string as a metaphor for the energy of strong feelings, this beautifully written storybook is a journey of the physical sensations of anger as it runs through the character’s body - making them want to punch as it gets into their arms, kick and stomp as it travels down their legs and scream out hateful things as it wraps itself around their heart. Full of relatable and easy to understand scenarios, The Red String: has a gender neutral central character helps children to identify powerful feelings like anger and recognise their possible effects introduces the strategy of allowing the energy of strong feelings to ‘dance’ in our body, instead of letting them control our thoughts and behaviour enables children to begin to accept strong feelings such as anger, without shame or judgment ends with a mindful reflection, to help children explore and be with their feelings. Strong feelings can be overwhelming and consuming. This book is essential reading for teachers, parents, or anyone working with young people who wishes to help children understand, embrace and cope with powerful feelings such as anger, in a healthy way.




I Don’t Want to be Me - Amelie’s Walk: Exploring Self-Acceptance


Book Description

To get the full Being With Our Feelings experience, this book can be purchased alongside the guidebook. All books can be purchased together as a set, Being With Our Feelings: Guidebook and Four Storybooks Set, 978-0-367-77231-4. Meet Amelie, a girl who doesn’t want to be who she is. As she ventures out on a walk one day, she comes across a tree, a flea, the sea, a pea and finally a bee - all simply being who they are. One by one, Amelie majestically attempts to become each character, but soon discovers how exhausting and painful it is trying to be anything other than yourself. Full of enchanting illustrations and relatable characters, I Don’t Want to be Me: supports emotional wellbeing through a greater sense of self-worth and self acceptance helps children to discover alongside Amelie, that being yourself is enough ends with a mindful reflection to help children explore and be with their feelings. This book is essential reading for teachers, parents, and anyone who wishes to help children feel heard, seen and accepted, just as they are.




What if All the Trees Blow Away?: Exploring Anxiety, Fear and Uncertainty


Book Description

To get the full Being With Our Feelings experience, this book can be purchased alongside the guidebook. All books can be purchased together as a set, Being With Our Feelings: Guidebook and Four Storybooks Set, 978-0-367-77231-4. This captivating, storybook helps young people identify and explore feelings of anxiety, fear and uncertainty. As the narrator anxiously pours out a plethora of ‘What if?’ thoughts ranging from realistic to fantastical, these seemingly never-ending worries eventually build into what some readers may recognise as a panic attack. They discover that beneath the head full of worries lies the feeling of fear, and rather than resolving all the anxious questions, they can acknowledge and be with the fear itself. Sensitively written and highly relatable to anyone who has experienced anxious thinking, What if All the Trees Blow Away?: has a gender neutral central character helps children recognise their anxious thoughts as fear guides children on how to take back control of their anxious thinking explores the connection between emotional, mental, and physical wellbeing aids in normalising the feelings of fear and worry encourages sharing and seeking support ends with a mindful reflection, to help children explore and be with their feelings. This storybook is essential reading for teachers, parents, or anyone working with children, who wishes to enable open conversations, exploration and expression around fear and anxiety.




I Just Can’t Decide!: Exploring the Challenge of Making Choices


Book Description

To get the full Being With Our Feelings experience, this book can be purchased alongside the guidebook. All books can be purchased together as a set, Being With Our Feelings: Guidebook and Four Storybooks Set, 978-0-367-77231-4. This colourful, engaging, gender neutral story, introduces the reader to a child overwhelmed with all of life’s choices. Should they sit with their friends or befriend someone new? Should they share what they know or keep it to themselves? Should they listen to their heart or follow the crowd? Written with honesty and a clear youth voice, I Just Can’t Decide!: looks at the challenge of making choices champions the courage to make your own choices promotes listening to your heart, intuition and body, in addition to your mind teaches children about conscious behaviour and self-reflection explores ideas of integrity, values and right action ends with a mindful reflection, to help children explore and be with their feelings. This book is essential reading for teachers, parents, or anyone working with children, who wishes to empower young people to make good choices, with sensitivity and self-awareness.







Permission to Feel


Book Description

The mental well-being of children and adults is shockingly poor. Marc Brackett, author of Permission to Feel, knows why. And he knows what we can do. "We have a crisis on our hands, and its victims are our children." Marc Brackett is a professor in Yale University’s Child Study Center and founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. In his 25 years as an emotion scientist, he has developed a remarkably effective plan to improve the lives of children and adults – a blueprint for understanding our emotions and using them wisely so that they help, rather than hinder, our success and well-being. The core of his approach is a legacy from his childhood, from an astute uncle who gave him permission to feel. He was the first adult who managed to see Marc, listen to him, and recognize the suffering, bullying, and abuse he’d endured. And that was the beginning of Marc’s awareness that what he was going through was temporary. He wasn’t alone, he wasn’t stuck on a timeline, and he wasn’t “wrong” to feel scared, isolated, and angry. Now, best of all, he could do something about it. In the decades since, Marc has led large research teams and raised tens of millions of dollars to investigate the roots of emotional well-being. His prescription for healthy children (and their parents, teachers, and schools) is a system called RULER, a high-impact and fast-effect approach to understanding and mastering emotions that has already transformed the thousands of schools that have adopted it. RULER has been proven to reduce stress and burnout, improve school climate, and enhance academic achievement. This book is the culmination of Marc’s development of RULER and his way to share the strategies and skills with readers around the world. It is tested, and it works. This book combines rigor, science, passion and inspiration in equal parts. Too many children and adults are suffering; they are ashamed of their feelings and emotionally unskilled, but they don’t have to be. Marc Brackett’s life mission is to reverse this course, and this book can show you how.




The Mindful Child


Book Description

Help the children in your life protect themselves with these groundbreaking age-appropriate mindfulness techniques. Mindful awareness works by enabling you to pay closer attention to what is happening within you—your thoughts, feelings, and emotions—so you can better understand what is happening to you. The Mindful Child extends the vast benefits of mindfulness training to children from four to eighteen years old with age-appropriate exercises, songs, games, and fables that Susan Kaiser Greenland has developed over more than a decade of teaching mindful awareness to kids. These fun and friendly techniques build kids’ inner and outer awareness and attention, which positively affects their academic performance as well as their social and emotional skills, such as making friends, being compassionate and kind to others, and playing sports, while also providing tools to manage stress and to overcome specific challenges like insomnia, overeating, ADHD, hyper-perfectionism, anxiety, and chronic pain. When children take a few moments before responding to stressful situations, they allow their own healthy inner compasses to click in and guide them to become more thoughtful, resilient, and empathetic. The step-by-step process of mental training presented in The Mindful Child provides tools from which all children—and all families—will benefit.




The Mindfulness Matters Program for Children and Adolescents


Book Description

This indispensable resource provides a flexible framework and a wealth of engaging tools for teaching mindfulness to children and adolescents with varying needs in school or clinical settings. Numerous kid-friendly mindfulness practices are presented, complete with step-by-step instructions, sample scripts, suggested variations, and discussion questions. The benefits of mindfulness for enhancing children's social–emotional competencies are clearly explained. Clinicians and teachers are guided to select and sequence activities for groups struggling with specific challenges: stress and anxiety, depression, attention problems, behavioral and emotion regulation issues, and trauma. In a convenient large-size format, the book includes 14 reproducible handouts. Purchasers get access to a Web page where they can download and print the reproducible materials.




The Mindful Teacher′s Toolkit


Book Description

Do you want to help your students develop their social and emotional skills? Do you want to help build a whole school approach to mindfulness and wellbeing? The Mindful Teacher’s Toolkit gives you clear directions to develop mindful practices and ideas for how to integrate these into your teaching. The book contains detailed guidance on how to work with different age groups, from 4-18 years, and looks at whole-school approaches through specific subject areas and implementation strategies. Designed so that you can dip into each chapter, all of the activities are adaptable by language, tone and content so that you can apply and personalise them to your teaching. The combination of expert advice, teaching tips, reflections, activities and real-life examples provides you with everything you need to be able to develop your own mindful classroom and contribute to improving wellbeing in your school community.