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!

March is Social Work Appreciation Month!

Detroit Prep is committed to honoring and supporting the “whole child,” meaning we focus on the academic, social, emotional, and behavioral needs of each individual.  Along with administration and teaching staff, School Social Workers work closely alongside the school team to work with students who could benefit from developing any number of skills and strategies to succeed in their learning environment.  

What does a School Social Worker do?

School Social Workers (SSWs) hold a master’s degree and are trained mental health professionals, licensed through the state of Michigan.  Social Workers utilize a concept called systems theory, which takes into consideration the biological, psychological, and social environmental influences on a client or community.  We work as a link between home, school, and community, assisting with therapeutic interventions and providing referrals to families in need of resources.

School Social Workers:

• Team up with parents, teachers, and other service providers to assess students for barriers to academic and social success, and create plans to help students address emotional, behavioral, social, or academic issues

• Advocate for proper accomodations in the classroom and needs for families

• Provide targeted therapy to students

• Help with goal setting, planning, behavior plans, IEPs, 504s

• Listen and provide support for students

• Assist in dealing with a crisis

Meet our awesome Social Work team!

Ms. Aly Tetreault is enjoying her second year at Detroit Prep! She graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in English before spending two years serving with the AmeriCorps program, City Year Detroit. During her time working within Detroit Public Schools, she discovered a passion for supporting and empowering students and families, and making sure they receive the quality education that they deserve! Aly returned to school and graduated with her Masters in Social Work, and a Master of Arts in Educational Studies in 2019. She loves exploring Detroit, spoiling her two cats, listening to podcasts, and writing creative non-fiction in her free time. She can be reached at aly@detroitprep.org!

Welcome to Ms. Briana Quaker, our newest Social Worker! Briana is excited to start her journey as a social worker at Detroit Prep! She graduated from Western Michigan University with a Bachelors in Psychology and Criminal Justice. She was employed at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services where she worked in child welfare and human services. During her time working at MDHHS, she realized that there was a great need for social workers to help provide resources to families in the Detroit area. In 2021 she received her Masters of Social Work from Wayne State University. Ms. Briana loves working with children and is excited to support and empower our students. She can be reached at briana@detroitprep.org!

Ms. Briana and Ms. Aly are honored to be supporting your students!  If you have any Social Workers in your life, make sure to thank them for all they do this month and beyond.  

Reading During the Holidays

As an adult living in Detroit, I only make the 13-hour drive down I-75 to my childhood Georgia home during the holiday season. My winter weeks down South consist of lots of coffee, bundled porch mornings in 50-degree weather, and grass that somehow stays green year round. The accompaniment of it all, though, are books. Whether it’s short stories for myself, romance novels for my mother, physics books (I will never understand) for my brother, or Arabic poetry readings with my father, the paper and pages in hand bond us together each holiday season. Reflecting as an adult, my parents were probably so happy to read a book aloud or, better yet, let us read silently to ourselves during Winter Break; it must have been way better than having to play an exhausting game of tag or piggyback rides (which we also requested often). And as children, we reaped the benefits. 

At Detroit Prep, we tell our third-grade Turtle Crew members that the best thing they can do at home is read for 20 minutes a day. Not only is reading a great way to strengthen familial relationships, but it also improves your vocabulary, critical thinking skills, and connection to identity. And, with the colder weather at our doorsteps, reading allows you to escape cabin fever without leaving the warmth of the cabin. Making reading fun means every subject is more enjoyable, whether reading math word problems, deciphering science vocabulary, or diving into primary sources in social studies. It also teaches your child about new content and information. In small group instruction, our students have learned that President Obama was the first Black president (these kids are so young), explored lessons about friendships built on differences, and compared American customs to those in Japan. Reading is not reserved to the realm of education; reading unlocks a world of knowledge.

With so many upcoming breaks, there’s no better time than now to start that daily reading habit. While you may have your favorite books at home, Detroit Prep has new books to lend if you want to explore something different. Ask your teachers or small group instructors about what stories you may be able to borrow for the holidays. Beyond our little school on Sylvester, though, the Detroit community has endless resources available. The Detroit Public Library offers free memberships, including storytimes and eBooks, for anyone in the metro-Detroit area. Check out the Little Free Library project to see if there may be a bevy of books waiting for you in your neighborhood. If you want someone to read to your child, you can sign up for free mentorship through Brilliant Detroit and access their libraries after school. Even holiday traditions can be made into a reading experience (Read a shopping tag! Decode a brand name! Go through a recipe book!). Although we will miss your scholars at Detroit Prep, we hope we can support the buzz of learning at home in the midst of all the holiday excitement.