Mastering Lock down Drills with Meditation

Every day we stop everything we are doing and take time to meditate. It's a quiet period with either relaxing music playing in the background, or a guided meditation that leads us to focus on our breathing and release our tension.

I read an article awhile back talking about how it's important for kids to have down time and stop their brains for a few minutes during the day. To give them permission to stop and take a breath. We expect so much of them during school time and it's go go go in our room. I was super skeptical at first. My room is anything but quiet and calm. I love it, but its reality.

When we started doing meditation this last year it was more than a little crazy-- we had kids running around, making all sorts of different noises, and not being able to sit for more than a couple minutes. I remember thinking....am I crazy to try this? Slowly....very slowly overtime things began to change. The kids began to be quieter, they began to relax, and follow the breathing exercises. I finally realized how much it had improved when I had a staff member walk in and she looked around amazed. I realized then that it was absolutely silent with every student completely relaxed. I was SO EXCITED! It's hard sometimes to track the progress in our classroom because it's slow.

Later that year I realized meditation had created a very important side effect.

Drills for classrooms like ours are a stretch. They create anxiety as they are out of the norm, not in the schedule, and make some of my students very apprehensive. Lock down Drills are particularly difficult. We are supposed to keep all the students gathered together in the back of the room seated on the floor, and keep them silent. I have lots of kids who make all kinds of fun and interesting noises. But I realized on this drill day however, they were all SILENT. They had learned to take a break, to be quiet, and to just relax when asked to. Such an important thing that could actually save their life.

So my class has mastered lock down drills with Meditation....who knew.