Year five has begun! We are landing in our beautiful new expanded spaces with as much grace as we can muster. And we are getting to know so...many...people! Think of it: Current U Schoolers now number almost a hundred! Coming up next month, we'll be inviting everyone in to see the new digs for our annual October Soiree. (Mark your calendar! Thursday, 10/10/19, 7-9 pm.) For now, we're happy to introduce all the new members of our team, and re-introduce the old:
Ryan Brown
Executive Director and Co-Founder
Andrea Ayotte
Assistant Program Director
3/4 Classroom A
3/4 Classroom B
4/5 Classroom C
4/5 Classroom D
Fabio da Cunha (Lobinho)
Capoeira Teacher
Lauren Roy
4/5 Art Studio Teacher
Vanessa
3/4 Art Studio Teacher,
Chef
Natalie Berry
Yoga Teacher,
Gardener
Tim Haldeman
Music Teacher
Upcoming U Family Offerings
Lexicon Circles
So much depends upon how skillfully and consistently we communicate with the children in our care. It helps to have language prepared for yourself as a guide to wordings that model respect, build trust, and so forth...
It helps even more to share such language with other grown-ups who are co-raising and educating our children.
At the U School, we call this language our Lexicon. And we like to get together with other parents and educators who want to talk about how to talk the talk.
The Lexicon Circles are monthly discussions held at the U School for a couple leisurely but focused hours. People come bearing questions and challenges around raising and educating young children. First we get organized by looking for commonalities to address among the topics at hand. Then we dig into ways that the U School Lexicon can apply to our discussions with children moving forward.
Register for the next one on Thursday, September 19, from 6:30-8:30. Drop-ins are also welcome! Suggested donation is $10/family, and the proceeds go straight into our tuition fund. Read more about the program here.
We start on this path by learning how to strengthen our three core mindful awareness skills and how to notice the five basic ways this practice enhances our happiness and competence. How do those improvements spill over into our real-time presence with the children in our care?
New territory...
Please check out the calendar of extension courses* we’ll be offering throughout the year. These are four-week dives into topics of highly practical mindfulness applications:
Practice with Children — How to share our mindfulness practice more openly and directly with children (mostly by learning to follow their lead).
Behavior Improvement — How to tweak two of the core practices we learned in the intro to target our own habits, either to weaken the bad or strengthen the good.
Choiceless Awareness — How and why to access restfulness at deeper levels of attentional circuitry.
Present-Centered Awareness — How and why to pay attention to the absolute Now.
*If you haven’t taken the intro yet, please take the plunge. You will not regret turning up your attention. And the intro is the prerequisite to all the extensions. So get booted up! The next train won’t leave until Spring…
What were we up to over the summer, by the way? Chess!
