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A ever-growing collection of information by Stuart Shanker and TMC (The Mehrit Centre). https://self-reg.ca/self-reg/self-regknowledge-series/

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Access these webinars on a variety of self-regulation topics anytime.

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Brain Gym is committed to the principle that moving with intention leads to optimal learning.

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Harriet Winterflood's presentation

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Sept 25, 2017 Goulter School

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TPT - Debbie has copy

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TPt - Debbie has copy

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42 Mindfulness Brain Breaks to Cultivate Focus & Self-Regulation

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42 Mindfulness Brain Breaks to Cultivate Focus & Self-Regulation

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TPT - Debbie has copy

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A sleep and relaxation app that allows you mix sounds to create custom melodies.
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/relax-melodies-sleep-sounds-white-noise-fan/id314498713?mt=8

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http://parentingchaos.com/anxiety-apps-kids/

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Anxiety is one of the biggest day-to-day challenges that my Autistic daughter faces. It's one of those dark sides of Autism that many Autistic people struggle with. From coping with change to sensory needs to difficulty understanding emotions and black and white thinking, anxiety likes to creep in and roar...loudly. This list of 15 Apps for Kids with Anxiety has done wonders for helping us navigate the negative thinking, difficult social situations, and anxiety.

We personally are an iOS family, but I did manage to find quite a few of these on Amazon Underground to be used for Android devices or on the Leap Frog Epic (see tutorial on how to put Amazon Underground on your Epic here).

Apps to Help Kids Cope with Anxiety
Breathe, Think, Do Sesame
Breathe, Think, Do with Sesame is intended for parents and caregivers to use with their young children (ages 2-5) to help teach skills such as problem-solving, self-control, planning, and task persistence.
Calm
Calm is the perfect meditation app for beginners, but also includes hundreds of programs for intermediate and advanced users.

Guided meditation sessions are available in lengths of 3, 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25 minutes so you can choose the perfect length to fit with your schedule.
DreamyKid
The DreamyKid meditation app offers meditation, guided visualization and affirmations curated just for children & teens. It uses proven techniques that teach your kids methods to guide them towards a happier life through mindfulness.
Headspace: Guided Meditation and Mindfulness
Meditation made simple. Guided meditations suitable for all levels from Headspace. Meditation can help improve your focus, exercise mindful awareness, relieve anxiety and reduce stress.
Kids Yoga Deck
Children will love to move their bodies as they flip through their very own yoga deck. With clear pictures and step-by-step instructions, these yoga poses are fun, child-friendly, and great for every body!
Stop, Breathe, and Think Kids
As parents, we want to raise our kids to be able to handle whatever comes their way. Whether they need to mellow out before bed, develop positive relationships or simply have a peaceful moment, Stop, Breathe & Think Kids offers children a fun and easy way to identify and process their emotions. From counting breaths to friendly wishes or frog jumps, each activity brings fun rewards to keep them engaged.
Breathing Bubbles
Breathing Bubbles is an app that helps kids practice releasing worries and focusing on good feelings by allowing kids to select the emotion they are feeling and how strongly they are feeling it. Kids can choose to handle their emotion by releasing a worry or receiving a joy as Manny the Manatee walks them through deep breathing and visualization.
Smiling Mind
Smiling Mind is designed to help people pressure, stress, and challenges of daily life. This app has a fantastic section on Mindfulness in the Classroom and is suited for kids ages 7-18.
Positive Penguins
The four positive penguins take you on an interactive journey to help you understand that feelings arise from your thinking and if you challenge your negative thoughts successfully you may be able to see things in a more realistic and even optimistic way.
Calm Counter
Calm Counter is a visual and audio tool to help people calm down when they are angry or anxious. The app includes a social story about anger, and audio/visual tools for calming down.
emotionary
Emotionary guides users through five primary emotions to find the right category of feeling, with all definitions pared back to the essentials and displayed so they can be easily compared.
Take a Chill
This app is full of tools to help manage that stress, and bring mindful practices into a daily routine. Using quick mindful exercises and thoughtful activities, begin to overcome those moments whether it's studying for a test or preventing negative thoughts and patterns.
Chill Outz
Chill Outz® is a collection of fun animated stories teaching children proven techniques to stay mindful & relaxed anywhere, anytime.
Super Stretch Yoga
Super Stretch is an educational yoga tool to use and teach the fun of physical activity and breathing to children. They will use the skills of self-awareness, self-esteem and self-regulation that they learn from this app as a foundation for the rest of their lives.
Relax Melodies
Mix and listen to over 52 different relaxing sounds with background sound support - this app can be used while using other apps!
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Anxiety is one of the biggest day-to-day challenges that my Autistic daughter faces. It's one of those dark sides of Autism that many Autistic people struggle with. From coping with change to sensory needs to difficulty understanding emotions and black and white thinking, anxiety likes to creep in and roar...loudly.

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A website devoted to living, learning, and teaching with mindful awareness.
http://www.mindfulteachers.org/

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How Meditation Can Reshape Your Brain - TEDx Cambridge

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How Meditation Can Reshape Your Brain - TEDx Cambridge

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Neuroscientist Sara Lazar's amazing brain scans show meditation can actually change the size of key regions of our brain, improving our memory and making us more empathetic, compassionate, and resilient under stress.

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How Meditation Can Reshape Our Brains: Sara Lazar at TEDxCambridge 2011

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http://www.mindfulnessinstitute.ca/the-science/

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Classroom strategies for self-regulation are outlined in this book by Stuart Shanker. Goulter copy in Resource Room.
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/childcare/Shanker.pdf

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Debbie's personal copy in Resource Room.
http://www.themontessorinotebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/TheWhole-BrainChild.pdf

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Check out 1C's Hoberman in action!

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Dr Daniel Siegel presenting a Hand Model of the Brain

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This is "Dr Daniel Siegel presenting a Hand Model of the Brain" by Nicolette Stuart on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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The Biological Domain | The Self-Regulation Institute with Dr. Stuart Shanker

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The Self-Regulation Institute presents: a Self-Reg in 60 Seconds Video Series with Dr. Shanker. In this instalment, Dr. Shanker discusses the Biological Domain of Shanker Self-Reg®.

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https://www.commonsensemedia.org/app-reviews/settle-your-glitterhttps://www.commonsensemedia.org/app-reviews/settle-your-glitter

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https://www.alertprogram.com/https://www.alertprogram.com/

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http://www.self-regulation.ca/http://www.self-regulation.ca/

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At Cindrich elementary school in Surrey, B.C., 10-year-old boys are putting themselves to bed earlier, an enthusiastic girl in Grade 6 takes herself for a run when she's feeling hyper, and a diminutive boy who is still learning English tells his teacher he will do better work if he sits on a special cushion.

It is all part of self-regulation, a philosophy of education that is moving into public schools in British Columbia.

The Surrey School district is the largest of six districts in B.C. that has taken it on, almost out of self-defence.

On CBC radio's The Sunday Edition Dec. 1, starting 9 a.m. Eastern:

Karima Bennoune on her book about ordinary Muslims who risk death to combat fundamentalism.

Howard Norman's memoir, I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place.

Little Miss Higgins performs live in studio.

Computer geeks develop software to help manage illness, with input from doctors, nurses and patients.

"I just saw kids coming into my classroom and me getting frustrated at their behaviour," says Lianne McBride, a Grade 5 teacher at Cindrich.

McBride says she became one of what Surrey is calling its first wave of self-regulation teachers because she realized, "I love my job, but ... there's got to be a different way to reach kids, for them to reach themselves, because what I'm doing isn't working."

Self-regulation ultimately hands the job of taking charge of their learning and their behaviour back to the kids.

Teachers look for what is stressing a child and making them unable to pay attention, lethargic, or hyper sometimes to the point where they are out of control. It might be too much noise in the classroom, too little sleep or too much junk food in their lunch.

Then the teachers help the child recognize what they need to do to make themselves calm and productive in class.

Remembering what calm means

Stuart Shanker, a distinguished research professor of philosophy and psychology at York University, is the pied piper of self-regulation in the schools. He maintains that Canadian kids do not know what it is to feel calm any more. There is too much stimulation in their lives.

Shanker worked with the late Fraser Mustard, a respected figure in childhood education in Canada.

Eight years ago, they began tracking the escalating numbers of anxiety disorders, depression, and behaviour problems - not to mention the seemingly endless cases of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

"There is more public and physician awareness," he says, "and we are being too liberal in our diagnoses." But he adds that no matter how you cut it, "there is something going on out there. We have never seen numbers like this"

Shanker and Mustard concluded that children are dealing with an overwhelming amount of stress, defined as anything that makes the brain burn excess energy.

That idea isn't new. What is new is the neuroscience supporting it.

There has been a growing body of work showing that when a child's brain is overloaded, the thinking part of the brain shuts off. The more ancient part of the brain lights up, and the child moves into the more instinctual mode of fight-or-flight.

When a parent or a teacher - anyone - tries to reason with the child when they're in this state, "that child literally cannot hear you," Shanker says.

The trick, Shanker and others say, is to "de-escalate" - calm the child down and get them thinking again.

Learning self-regulation

Long term, the child needs to learn what it is that is stressing them out and what to do about it.

That's where teachers come in.

Self-regulation has long been a tool of therapists, but Mustard and Shanker concluded that there just weren't enough medical professionals in the country to deal with the growing number of children with problems. There were also more than enough children on medication to modify their behaviour.

The solution, Mustard and Shanker decided, lay in training teachers to train children.

In February 2012, George Abbott - the minister of education in B.C. at the time - invited Shanker to do a workshop for school superintendents explaining the neuroscience and going through some of the things that have worked in pilot programs.

One principal in West Vancouver had an unusual number of children who were sensitive to noise, for example. Noisy classrooms and hallways are an old problem, and the realization that this was a tipping point for some children was the eureka moment.

"The principal in West Vancouver brought in headphones, the kind you use with chainsaws to block out sound," Shanker says. "The kids who needed them put them on, then asked if they could keep them for the day. Academic performance skyrocketed because they were paying attention for longer periods of time

It's common now to see three or four pairs of sound-blocking ear protectors hanging on the wall in most self-regulation classrooms.

Physical activity is also important in self-regulation, and yoga balls were another innovation. One teacher in a northern B.C. district had her children rolling down the ramp between the library and the classroom to wake up their bodies.

Celine Feazel takes her Grade 6/7 class at MJ Shannon School out for a run every morning. The run shakes out the lethargy. This is not Phys Ed, it's an "engine break."

She has a large chart on the side wall with "How does your engine run" written across the top, a question she asks of her class every day.

And the kids understand what it does.

"Other than getting angry or hyper really quickly, I will take engine breaks," says 11 year old Simran Banghu. "I will use self-regulation, take a run to calm myself down."

Banghu wins awards for her academic achievement. "She saw it as a chance to do even better," Feazel says.

After a few months of the teacher asking about engine breaks, students began to ask it themselves. By the end of the year, when a child finds themselves, for example, slowing down in the afternoon, they will leave a note on their desk, pick a buddy and head out for a run by themselves.

Calmer kids

Calm, alert and focused is the mantra of self-regulation.

'Kids are kids ... there will be moments.' - Mike McKay, superintendent of the Surrey District

Calmer kids does not mean a classroom of Buddhist monks. "Kids are kids ... there will be moments," says Mike McKay, the superintendent of the Surrey District.

But there has been an outbreak of self-discipline. McKay was struck so deeply by the change, he is taking early retirement to work full time on Shanker's venture.

Surrey's 10 First Wave teachers who began the program last year also meet regularly to talk things through.

"I had a little guy yesterday who was under his desk," says Norene Campion, a Grade 3 teacher. "He couldn't sit in his chair. I just said 'go and get your lunch' ... I didn't even talk to him about his behaviour, it was about his lunch. I never would have done that last year. We are looking at children differently."

And interest in self-regulation is growing. When Shanker gave a workshop in the summer of 2012, 250 teachers signed up. This year it was 800.

Thirty-four more elementary schools in Surrey have asked if they can take part. Every school in Yukon is moving towards self-regulation, and a growing number of school districts in Ontario are coming on board.

While self-regulation is aimed at relaxing kids and improving classroom behaviour, the question remains: Does it improve grades?

There are anecdotal examples, like the positive experience with sound-blocking headphones in the West Vancouver school, but the next step is to formally study the impact on every aspect of children .

"It's all moved so fast," says Shanker, "we haven't had time to do the science. We will do that now - look at emotion, behaviour as well as academic outcomes."

[Listen to the full audio documentary about self-regulation, titled "How does your engine run," in the link at the top-left of this story or on The Sunday Edition's website.]

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health/child and teen health/attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

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Self-regulation: Can it help kids behave better in school?

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At Cindrich elementary school in Surrey, B.C., 10-year-old boys are putting themselves to bed earlier, an enthusiastic girl in Grade 6 takes herself for a run when she's feeling hyper, and a diminutive boy who is still learning English tells his teacher he will do better work if he sits on a special cushion.

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John Medina's 12 rules about the brain and how they apply to daily life including work and school. Copy in Resource Room.
http://www.brainrules.net/

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Great resources including the Healthy Mind Platter and Hand Model of the Brain.  Books I have include Mindsight and The Whole-Brain Child.
http://www.drdansiegel.com/home/

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An expert in the field of behaviour, Ross Greene's website has links to his books and non-profit program - Collaborative and Proactive Solutions. Copy of Lost at School in Resource Room.
http://drrossgreene.com/

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A resource for transformational social-emotional learning and classroom management.
https://consciousdiscipline.com/

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In her research, Carol Dweck revealed two types of mindsets (growth and fixed), and their effects on the learning of children.  Google this topic for loads of good resources. Debbie's personal copy in Goulter Resource Room.
https://mindsetonline.com/whatisit/about/

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An interactive program to help promote self-regulation in kids with autism and anxiety. Goulter Resource has one DVD and one USB stick.
https://thinkingmoves.com

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A simple concept with great results. Division Office has a copy.
https://www.5pointscale.com

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A systematic way to teach self-regulation to students. Goulter book in Resource Room.
http://www.zonesofregulation.com/index.html

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https://mindup.org/
A program based in neuroscience, positive psychology, mindful behaviour, and social-emotional learning. Debbie's personal copy K-2 curriculum in Resource Room.

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A app with over 6000 free meditations.

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Insight Timer - #1 Free Meditation App for Sleep, Relax & More

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The best meditation app with the world’s largest FREE library of more than 190k guided meditations, 17k teachers & the world’s most loved meditation Timer.

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An app for mindfulness and meditation.  Costs $ but many excellent free features for breathing and visual imagery.

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Calm is the #1 app for sleep and meditation. Join the millions experiencing better sleep, lower stress, and less anxiety.