Welcome back to another great year at Lafayette!

It's finally here - the day parents dream about all summer - the first week of school! It passed in a blinding rush of hellos, hugs, laughter, "how-was-your-summer"s, and a perhaps few tears too. We've had a lot of fun seeing all the students back for another year, and are beginning to learn the names and faces of our new students too. We are so excited to be back and to have many wonderful changes happening at the same time. For an overview of the programs and services the Oasis team will be providing this year, click here. We are gearing up for a great school year, and here are just some of the upcoming events we'll be celebrating together soon:

September

·       Friday 9/5 and Monday 9/8: New Student Lunch Bunches for grades 1-5 (schedule forthcoming)

·       September is Peace Month

·       Weekly Peace classes begin in all grades

·       Friday 9/26: Wear your peace items to school day

October

·       October is College Awareness Month

·       Peace classes will include discussions on college & career

·       Friday, 10/24: Wear a college T-shirt day

·       TBA: First Oasis Advisory Group  (OAG) meeting

Stay tuned for more information on these exciting events, and drop by the Oasis to say hi if you haven't already. We'd love to see you! --Jillian

Mindfulness At Home Workshop

We had a great time at our Mindfulness at Home workshop the other night!  A nice group of parents gathered together to experience some of the mindfulness practices that we do in Peace Class.  They were so relaxed by the end of the hour that we all floated home!  I shared a bunch of resources that you can use to learn about and practice mindfulness at home.  It would be so great if the kids were able to keep up their mindfulness practice over the summer.  The resource list is below.  Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions at linda.ryden@dc.gov.  I'll schedule another parent workshop in the Fall.

Resources for practicing mindfulness at home

Building Emotional Intelligence, Linda Lantieri (with cd of guided mindfulness exercises)

Sitting Still Like a Frog: Mindfulness Exercises for Kids (and their parents), Eline Snel  (book and cd)

A Still Quiet Place: A Mindfulness Program for Teaching Children and Adolescents to Ease Stress and Difficult Emotions, Amy Saltzman, MD

Ten Percent Happier , Dan Harris . 

Story Books:

Ahn’s Anger, Gail Silver

Steps and Stones, Gail Silver

Moody Cow Meditates, Kerry MacLean

Mindful Monkey, Happy Panda, Kerry MacLean

Websites:

 

MINDS Incorporated www.mindsincorporated.org

Mindful.org – Website of Mindful Magazine. Offers tons of resources about mindfulness

Mindfulschools.org

Check out our Peace of Mind Slideshow

 

Here's some great pictures and quotes from our students about mindfulness!

Mindfulness and Your Child: Post-Event Recap

A Pre-K student practices mindful breathing

Thanks to everyone who attended our event last night! We had almost 50 people out to learn more about Mindfulness and Your Child. First we watched a short video on Linda Ryden's Peace of Mind program and why she started the program. Next we heard a short talk from Dave Trachtenberg, Program Manager at MINDS, Inc. on the definition, science, and benefits of mindfulness. In a nutshell, Dave shared that "awareness" is another word for mindfulness and that there are thousands of scientific studies proving the benefits of mindfulness on our immune system, executive functioning, behavior, stress levels, and general health and well-being. He works primarily with teenagers and just wrapped up a mindfulness training program for teens at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, MD. He shared some anecdotes on how those teens have benefited from the training, and how much more our students will benefit having started the training so early while their brains are still malleable. He stressed that we want our children to learn how to "pause" and have awareness of their feelings (anger, hurt, sadness, anxiety, self-judgement, etc.) before reacting or lashing out, as these feelings become more intensified in adolescence and the ramifications of poor impulse control can be much more serious. He praised Lafayette for being "the only school in the DC/MD/VA area" to have such a large and intensive mindfulness program with 700 students! We ended the event with a slideshow of some of the Peace Classes with our students (to be uploaded to the blog soon!), and Linda and I told a bit about how we run the classes. It was a nice evening, but if you missed it and would like more information on mindfulness please feel free to contact us!
-Jillian

Fun with Magna Tiles at Peace Club

April 3, 2014 Mindfulness Event

Lafayette Elementary School Cordially invites you to Mindfulness and Your Child Come hear about the benefits of Mindfulness to you and your child, and learn about Lafayette’s own cutting-edge mindfulness program, Peace of Mind. April 3rd, 2014 7:00 p.m. This event will follow the general HSA meeting at 6:30 5701 Broad Branch Road, NW Washington, DC 20015 For more information please contact Linda.Ryden@dc.gov or Jillian.Diesner@dc.gov

A high-schooler at Wilson remembers Peace Class

Today I had a visit from a Lafayette graduate who is now in 9th grade at Wilson.  He came by, he said, to apologize to me.  He hugged me and said, "Ms. Ryden, I'm sorry for all the **** I gave you in Peace class!"  I laughed because what I remembered about him was that he was a skeptic who found Peace class a little too "touchy-feely" for his taste.  But then he said, "You know, I never appreciated what I was learning in Peace class at the time, but all through middle school I found that I was using the stuff you taught me all the time.  I guess I had to get a little more mature to realize it."  He talked about thinking about other people's feelings, understanding his own, and using the conflict resolution skills he learned at Lafayette.  Hearing a story like this obviously warms my heart because as teachers we never know whether or not we are really having an impact on a child.  It's a good reminder that we really don't know what is going on in a child's mind and we never know if the seeds we plant when they are young are going to grow and flower.  It's good to know that sometimes those flowers can bloom in the most unlikely places!

If you would like to find out more about what your child is experiencing in Peace Class come to our event, "Mindfulness and Your Child" on Thursday April 3rd at 7pm (right after the HSA general meeting).  Feel free to contact me for more information at linda.ryden@dc.gov.

Mindful Froggies

This week in Peace Class with the younger grades, we've been practicing mindfulness by pretending to be frogs. Using the book Sitting Still Like a Frog by Eline Snel and the accompanying CD, we've learned how frogs can be both very active, noisy and busy AND very still, alert, and mindful. Of course, most of the time kids' natural inclination is to be the noisy, jumpy frog. With practice, however, children can easily learn how to control those impulses for short amounts of time. Learning this skill is essential in school and in life. Being able to pause, reflect on what's happening, and then respond has all kinds of proven scientific benefits, as explained in this scholarly review of recent research on mindfulness. We will continue to practice being mindful froggies here at school, and encourage you to help your child practice this at home sometimes too. With time and practice, your energetic, hoppy frogs can also learn to be mindful and reflective...who wouldn't like that?

-Jillian

January Peace Heroes

Congratulations to the following boys and girls!

 

Grace, Delaney, Charlie, Daniel

First:

Ella Grace A.

Aidan F.

Rory D.

Will C.P.

Evan J.

Amaan, Matthew F,  Elijah

 

 

Delia M.

Molly H. 

Liam B.

Second:

Molly R.

Hannah L.

Malachi M.

Harrison E.

Jesse C.

Matthew B.

Ms. Mosby, Ms. Diesner, Ms. Ryden

 Third:

Gillian G.

Gabriel S.

Noah G.

Elijah M.

Amaan L.

Lucy R.

Matthew F.

Priya A.

Mikayla W.

Charlie P. 

Ava Z. 

Daniel F. 

Kate T. 

Delaney S. 

 

Fourth: 

Owen T. 

Zoey C. 

Max 

Changa A. 

 

 

Fifth:  

Joseph D.  

Logan M.