Train Your Brain
TRAIN YOUR BRAIN
Learning about your brains is a foundation of trauma informed care and at Ridge all staff and students grades K-5 learn developmentally appropriate language for the parts of the brain. The school counselors teach lessons with each class helping students understand their brain, learn about their own self awareness and learn strategies for emotional regulation. As you walk through the halls you’ll hear things like, “was that your guard dog talking” and what that means is your brain dysregulated and how did that affect the choice you made? We also use the brain hand model which provides a visual and hands-on learning experience for kids to help them remember the parts of the brain and what happens when they “flip their lids” which is describing emotional dysregulation.
Once we established our foundation of our brain knowledge, we incorporated reset kits for each room/office in the school. Every student has a kit with a plan of how to reset their brains if they are feeling stress/overwhelmed or even bored. This reset strategy is science based and works to reconnect the prefrontal cortex to the brain so that the person can regain logical thinking.
What do the students like about this experience?
“I liked learning about the elephant part of my brain (hippocampus) because now I understand where my memories are stored in my brain” - 2nd grader
“I liked learning about my guard dog because now I know what fight flight or freeze is” - 4th grader
It also:
gives students the ability to understand in a simple way what affects their behavior and feelings.
it gives them pride to learn about something so complicated as their brain,
students can use a common language to describe their own emotional regulation which helps our staff know what they can do to help.
Timeline of this Project
Students began learning about their brain in the Fall of 2022 with our return to school after virtual learning/covid restrictions. Staff also was trained by counselors so they could reinforce information in their classroom daily. Each time we discuss a topic related to emotions or read a book where a character shows emotional dysregulation we circle back to what is happening in their brain. We review this topic every 9 weeks.
