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To get straight to the point: mindfulness belongs in the classroom. As an IB PYP teacher, I approach teaching through a philosophy that centres on the child and the development of the whole child. This philosophy resonates with my own beliefs for educating our children to become avid questioners with the skills and strategies and confidence to try to find out for themselves. I nurture a sense of wonder and a strong belief in self. With this sense of self, I have to understand how to develop this awareness of self within the children and how I can guide them towards understanding who they are as unique individuals and also as learners. Mindfulness has been added to the updated IB PYP Approaches to Learning Skills. Specifically, you can now find it under the skill of Self-Management.  In order to best serve the children, I first needed to understand exactly what this "mindfulness" thing was.

I'm lucky to be a part of our close-knit community of international inquiry teachers on...

Happy New Year!

For those who know me, it's not unusual for the restlessness to kick in and spark my wanderlust. I returned to Colorado only 18 months ago, after dragging my teenagers around for a  year in France for heaven's sake! The credit card is still recovering from the costs of shipping furniture across the Atlantic and back again! ( I do NOT recommend shipping your entire household goods, its cheaper to start afresh! But that's a whole other blog post I suppose. ) Yet, here I go again.....planning, planning...my next adventure.

Keep in mind, when I travel, it isn't for a two week package tour, although nothing wrong with that if that's your preference. Oh no. I'm more of the "shut up shop for a year or so"...

Its that time of year again……reflection, fresh starts, new beginnings and goal setting.

A New Year or even a new school year, is an exciting time to gather as a class community and to think about all the dreams and goals that everyone wants to make come true. When we begin with this type of thing, it’s a great idea to just make a list of ALL those aspirations. Dream boards are fun ways to do this. I make one every single year! Dream BIG! Think beyond school! Just get them thinking forward.

Now, in order to make this list meaningful rather than a forgotten exercise within a few days, we need to encourage the children to turn those dreams into goals.

Dream boards or vision boards are simple and fun ways to just go ALL out and dream! Goals begin with dreams.

As adults, we know the importance of...

Engagement. You know the scene; the entire class is actively involved in their learning. There’s a quiet buzz going on all around. Children are chatting to each other, conversations are focused discussing ideas, plans, strategies. There is movement around the room, with tools and equipment being independently gathered, heads are together, collaboration is seen all around. You know that you’ve nailed it when the busyness of learning is their business!

But…..and there’s definitely a but, how do we keep this going across the curriculum? Is it too idealistic? Time consuming? Can we cover all standards this way? Can we really trust the kids to run with this? How do we, as the teacher, fit it in?

This post isn’t about what engagement looks like in your classroom but rather  about how to initiate and maintain the engagement within authentic inquiry focused learning. Engagement is so much more than just keeping the children busy with...

A brand new year is upon us once more! And a  new year is always a good time for self reflection. (I have spoken a lot about reflection within the IB PYP and offered multiple strategies that can be used in previous posts. You can read more about that further on.) But with this post, I’m focusing largely on self-reflection; developing reflective thinking skills within the children and ultimately bringing each child a greater awareness of their own Learner Profile and personal, social and emotional development.

With reflection having been removed from the IB key concepts and student agency being a key focus lately, I felt that there was a need for us to maintain this big idea of reflection throughout our learning environment and certainly within the process of inquiry based learning itself. I wanted my students to be able to understand the importance of reflective thinking and it’s role in self-assessment and the inquiry process, not to mention personal, social and...