Mindful Mondays
Detroit Prep’s ACE (After Care & Enrichment) Programs are in full swing! The goal of ACE programs is to help students connect with their passions and interests, gain mentorship from caring adults, and cultivate friendships and connections to foster their love of learning, passion for exploring, and fulfilling their extraordinary potential. It also provides an opportunity for our amazing extended adult crew to share their talents, skills, and passions with students.
This fall, one of our offerings to students is a group diving into one of my favorite topics - MINDFULNESS! Led by a licensed social worker and Detroit Prep mom, the group focuses on what mindfulness is and how to use it as a student to support mental health and wellness. Students get the opportunity to participate in weekly sessions involving direct practice and reflection, and are practicing skills that can help them to:
Regulate emotions
Manage stress
Strengthen their attention to detail
Cultivate compassion for themselves and others
Mindfulness is the practice of focusing on yourself and your body in the present moment, without judgment of thoughts or feelings. Students have been asked to practice pausing and noticing sensations in their body while practicing yoga, meditation, and body scans. They have also been given the space to explore mindfulness with each of our 5 senses, fine-tuning their attention to details when it comes to hearing, touch, smell, sight, and taste. Our hands-on group gives students a safe space to practice these skills, and we hope that students will continue to bring these practices into our classrooms and their homes!
Want to practice some of these skills at home? Here are some ideas to engage your senses mindfully!
Hearing - For 1 minute, close your eyes and listen to everything going on around you. Listen for all of the possible sounds you hear in that minute. After 1 minute, write down as many as you remember. Do this with a family member and compare your lists!
Touch - Close your eyes. Have a friend pick out a random household item and hand it to you (you shouldn’t know what it is!). Take 30 seconds to feel the object and notice how it feels. Write down all of the words that describe how the object felt, then take a guess what it is!
Smell - Go to your favorite room or space. Notice what different odors you smell, both pleasant and unpleasant. Out of all of the smells in the space, note which is your favorite. Do some smells bring up emotions such as sadness, happiness, or anger?
Sight - Take a close look at a picture or painting around you. What details do you notice when you zoom in? Can you see the brush strokes or pencil strokes? Where do the colors meet or blend? Does the picture look different from far away? When you look closely at something, you can often see more than at first glance.
Taste - Challenge yourself to savor a piece of your favorite meal or snack. Let the piece melt in your mouth. Is it sweet, salty, sticky, sour? How does the texture feel on your tongue? For an extra fun challenge, do a blind-folded taste test with your family and see how many different foods you can guess!
