Lift Your Mood, Lift your Life!
Introducing Our Lift Your Mood, Lift Your Life Project:
Many of the students attending our Roadways Literacy Academy have dyslexia, a learning disability affecting up to 20% of the students in a regular classroom. Several also have ADHD, commonly associated with dyslexia, and which comes with further challenges. Dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and autism are other disabilities that often co-occur with dyslexia. Unlike other disabilities, dyslexia is invisible and often mistaken for laziness, lack of effort, or lack of cognitive ability.
In the fall our school applied for a grant sponsored by Saskatoon Community Foundation along with Cameco, with the funds awarded being earmarked for mental health. Immediately, we began putting a proposal together for a mental health project that would be appropriate for our students. Our proposal was accepted!
Lift Your Mood, Lift Your Life is the name of our project, and it will run from January 2023 to June 2023.
The objective or purpose for our project is to improve the mental well-being of our students, who because of their learning disabilities, deal with feelings of anxiety, fear, frustration, and sometimes anger, on a regular basis.
We would like to provide ways other than medication, to lift their moods and help them to realize that they can control their feelings toward the world around them. Each part of our project lends itself to improving the lifestyle of these young people by offering information and instruction on mind enhancing activities accessible to them every day.
Students will participate in activities considered to be “life-long” adventures, which they could choose to continue with on a regular basis throughout their lives. By experiencing the adventures as a group, indirectly we will be emphasizing how to support one another leading to stronger relationships. “Together feels better!”
Each adventure has been chosen because of the research that supports its claim to building healthy brains, increasing self-confidence, and its ability to change one’s mood. As well, each adventure can easily be continued on a regular basis by our students because they are accessible to all groups within our community. After the initial instruction and experience, each adventure will be reinforced at school through our Health and Wellness and Fine Arts classes.
Our January Adventure: Mindfulness and Gratitude
When you combine gratitude and mindfulness, it allows you to acknowledge the blessings in your everyday life and sit with this moment, right now. During hard times, a gratitude and mindfulness practice may help keep one’s perspective balanced.
This month the students were introduced to the idea of looking after their mental health just like we look after our physical health. The activities that they have participated in so far include:
Designing the leather cover of their Gratitude Journal which they write in each day.
Painting canvases to represent the 7 chakras and in doing so, learning about keeping balanced and focused with Ann Chatfield, author and illustrator of her own beautiful book, “Sacred Geometry.”
Learning about mindfulness and gratitude and how it keeps our thoughts in the moment rather than worrying about the past or the future with Trina Markusson, author of the children’s book, “Good Morning Sunshine.”