Mindfully Together in PSE in the Primary

When was your last walk? Were you better off than before you started? What was the conversation – with yourself or your fellow walkers – like?

With our return to campus, opportunities for encouraging social cohesion are all around us, and rotation 16 in Personal Social Education (PSE) found us taking our shoes off – or not – and enjoying mindful walking on the grass with a friend.

P1 learner Freida enjoyed her walk with a friend, stating hours later, “It was so relaxing.”

Mindful walking is an engagement of our Mindful Schools curriculum. “Feel each foot touch the ground. Keep your attention on the bottom of your feet and let’s slowly take three mindful steps forward. This time, notice how your foot feels when you lift it up. Can you feel the bottom of your feet on the ground and in the air?” It is so relaxing.

Knowing one another makes us richer. And we are guided toward interactions in our PSE outcomes, including “value interacting, playing and learning with others”. Rogers and Hammerstein said it best in their song “Getting to Know You”:

Getting to know you,

Getting to know all about you.

Getting to like you,

Getting to hope you like me.

Haven’t you noticed

Suddenly I’m bright and breezy?

Because of all the beautiful and new

Things I’m learning about you

Day by day.

What do we know about learning? We know that we can grow and change our brain through intentional choices. We know that the brain is a social organ. And we know that the PYP is all about social constructionism, growing conceptual understandings in a social context.

When we put it all together, we know wellness.

Works Cited

Mindfulness Curriculum. Mindful Schools, 2014.

Primary Years Programme: Personal, Social and Physical Education Scope and Sequence. International Baccalaureate, 2009.

Rogers, Richard, and Oscar Hammerstein. Getting to Know You. 1951. Accessed 19 Feb. 2022.

by Mr. Jeff Underhill, Primary Counselor