Eating a fruit, smelling and tasting it, feeling its texture and the chewing process itself. Listening to your heartbeat before and after a run. Identifying different sounds in your environment. Noticing when you feel the need to use the restroom and drink water, or when there is a strong emotion inside you. The children at be.Living practice this simple form of Mindfulness from a very early age, as a sort of awareness training to remain perceptive of what goes on inside them and out, moment by moment.
It all started in 2017, when our school teachers participated in a Mindfulness training course to learn more about it and introduce the children to this powerful tool, which helps develop self-knowledge and is very beneficial, increasing focus and concentration, reducing anxiety, and leading to greater emotional balance.
Since then, Mindfulness has become part of our Elementary School curriculum, with a specialized teacher. In Early Childhood Education, the teachers themselves can decide how to apply the content they learned during training, as they feel it is important and possible to include it in their daily activities.
For Early Childhood Education teacher Renata Ottoniel, the training experience was overwhelming. “It was very strong for me because I went through a personal transformation. I’ve always been very anxious and I think being a teacher causes anxiety, because we’re often working to meet deadlines, there’s a schedule to follow, we’re always thinking six months ahead. Learning about and starting to practice mindfulness taught me to live in the present, to add tranquility to my days, and also changed the way I viewed the children’s routine. I began to wonder: Why does everything always have to be so hectic? I started to notice when there was hyperactivity and excessive stimulus, when I was presenting too many activities on the same day, when I was too agitated or talking too loudly, and the effect it had on the children.”
Renata really identified with the practice and decided to deepen her studies. “I began to read about mindfulness and its origin, met writers, connected with emotional intelligence, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience authors, with constructivism itself; I wanted to learn it, to own it, to experience it in my life, and bring that depth to the children. I was able to draw a parallel between mindfulness for children in Early Childhood Education and the development of emotional skills and self-knowledge.”
The teacher explains that with young children, in practice, mindfulness is incorporated into daily life, depending on each group’s characteristics. “There’s no ‘let’s do mindfulness now’ moment. I’ve had groups in which the practices took place early in the day, at circle time for the children to concentrate; some practices involve food, eating really slowly, which is mindful eating. Another situation involves raising body awareness or perceiving the environment, the school sounds, the silence. These perception proposals are very quick, taking from 3 to 5 minutes, and are practices that happen throughout the day. As they grow, I begin to tell them that this is a mindfulness practice, which is a type of meditation, a way for us to stop and calm down, to understand what our body is trying to tell us. And then many children say that they didn’t actually taste their food, that they barely felt the desire to use the restroom, their own hunger or thirst.”
Within our school’s proposal, which understands children as protagonists in the learning process and active beings within their social environment, mindfulness adds to the development of autonomy, perception, and curiosity itself. “When we play a breathing game and understand that there is a little air inside our bodies and that a little wind comes out of our noses – this can become a catalyst for projects. In Early Childhood Education, we work with an emerging curriculum, which means we build a research project with the group throughout the year, based on what the children bring us. So first they noticed their breathing, then their heartbeat, then they became interested in the organ, and so we studied the heart, the heartbeat, and blood flow. Last year, with the class of four- to five-year-olds, we made a presentation based on emotions, on the perception that mindfulness enables.”
Teacher Renata says that the practices bring benefits that are clearly noticeable in the little ones’ behavior. “When you live in the present, when you’re there, just doing something or just existing, you don’t have to run around, do a thousand things all at the same time, as sometimes happens at home, when children are playing on their smartphones while talking to their moms, eating, but not actually doing anything fully. Having this mental organization, this bodily organization, living what is happening at that moment, significantly expands the children’s perception of everything. And it’s very interesting how kids take this knowledge home. Family members end up acquiring a bell or downloading apps that make the bell sound, ask us a lot about the exercises and how they can collaborate in daily life.”
With the pandemic, our challenge is to adapt mindfulness work to remote practices. We used to do something every day in face-to-face teaching, so the frequency of practices has ended up decreasing. But we’re still working hard on it! I’ve done live streams on body awareness, breathing, and every time before we start reading a story, we breathe and place ourselves in the present moment. I’ve been working a lot with heartfulness – a mindfulness practice that focuses on the qualities of the heart –, which is to engage with our feelings and emanate them to the outside world. We talk about nature, our gratitude for the moment we’re living, for our friendships, for our school, for the emotions that the stories themselves stir in us; because reading the stories, books that talk about diverse feelings, adds reflection to heartfulness.”
Of all the many benefits and learnings that Mindfulness brings to the little ones, Renata believes that the greatest one is the diminishing feeling of immediacy. “Children are undergoing a process of building their subjectivity and their place in the world. When we practice mindfulness with the children, we bring their consciousness to themselves, to the here and now. The effects are very positive, not only with respect to learning gains. Seemingly very simple things, like waiting for your friend to pick up their juice first without getting riled up to pick up your own, are very significant. You don’t need to be the first to brush your teeth, you can sit down, pick up a book and wait quietly, because you’ll brush them at some point, you always do, it’s always been like this. Just like you don’t have to be the first to speak. So, leaving that place of immediacy, emergency, which brings so much anxiety, is what I feel has been our great achievement in all groups and what has been allowing things to happen smoothly, so that learning time at school is good, so that our school isn’t just about appointments and schedules. Of course, this will always exist, both in and out of school, but it’s important that they can handle it better. I’m very glad to talk about mindfulness and very grateful to the school for introducing us to this precious tool.”
