Experimenting

The biggest part of my project was working with Sarah Smith, a first grade teacher, to plan and organize a time that I could teach her class and implement a few of the mindfulness activities that I had learned. I decided to work in the lower school because I thought it would be a true testament to whether or not implementing mindfulness works in the classroom, especially with first graders that have so much going on at once. We had many early morning meetings where we discussed which topic I would teach and how I would do it. We also decided that as a part of the small "experiment" I should teach one class a lesson while including small mindfulness activities, and then teach another class the exact same thing but just go straight through the lesson itself. This way I could see first hand if I noticed a difference in behavior between the two classes. The biggest challenge of this part of my project was figuring out how I would measure the success rate with the first graders. I initially wanted to give each class some sort of assessment with questions from the lesson I had taught to see if they were paying attention. But because they are so young, it's almost impossible to determine whether or not they knew the answer to a question because they were more focused, or maybe they already knew the answer, or maybe they were guessing. We eventually decided that in order to tell whether or not the mindfulness was helping to improve focus in the first grade, I would have to take note of the small things like how often kids would get out of their chairs to walk around, talk while someone else was talking, or simply just get completely off task. For my lesson, Mrs. Smith allowed me to teach something directly from the first grade curriculum about measurement.