Professional Book Club
Books: The MindUp Curriculum (Grades Pre-K – 2) and (Grades 3 – 5)
Brain-Focused Strategies for Learning – and Living
Published by Scholastic for The Hawn Foundation
Book Club held at Happy Valley School (J. Beswick, K. Holland, K. Kosolosky, L. Jackson, P. MacLean, L. McCallum, J. Gregory, S. Allen, L. Postle, T. Robertson, R. Gadd, S. Roberts, K. Kimoto, A. Byrne-Jergen, M. O’Regan)
MindUp is an evidence-based teaching model and curriculum for students in kindergarten through grade eight. It is aimed at fostering children’s social and emotional competence and psychological well-being. MindUp was developed based on the latest research in neuroscience, social and emotional learning, positive psychology and mindfulness.
A recent study on the MindUp program conducted at UBC found that:
- 82% of students who participated became more optimistic and thought more positively
- 81% of students learned to make themselves happy
- 87% were more accepting of others persepectives
- 58% tried to help others more often
- 88% felt they could use at least one thing they learned in MindUp at home or at school.
Teachers found that students liked learning and using the brain terminology. It has increased student’s own awareness of their thinking. Students loved the “shake jar” lesson and will reference back to it. Students tune in to the chime signal.
The program is laid out nicely and is easy to follow. Teachers love how it links to research and can be incorporated into Science.
The MindUp curriculum is a useful lesson-by-lesson approach of how to incorporate Mindfulness in the classroom. It is very useable and has lots of ideas and activities that students would enjoy and learn from.
The book is full of information and ways to present it to students that they can understand. The program gives parts of the brain “nicknames” to represent them but you could add visual representations and props to go with the complex language. The book provides many additional suggestions for pieces of literature to support the ideas of mindful seeing, smelling, tasting, etc. it can be used across the curriculum in language arts and it hits science through the 5 senses. Unless we intentionally teach this it’s going to be a skill many children miss out on.
One teacher simply said, “I love it!”