Set Your Intentions

 Have you ever wished you could be a  fortune teller to know what kind of day you will have when you wake up in the morning?

How cool would that be, right?! 

But here is the coolest thing ever....you don't HAVE to be a fortune teller.

You just need to decide.

Now, I know that there are going to be some people reading this thinking - hold on! You can't control what happens during the day. So how can you decide what kind of day you are going to have?

While it is completely true that there are things that pop up during your day that you can not control...what you CAN control, is how you respond and react.

There is a LOT of POWER in setting your day up as soon as you open your eyes in the morning and you can help your kids set their day up as well!

As a teacher, for everything that we teach, we must set a learning intention.

These learning intentions are monitored by their success criteria. This is how we work out and understand whether students have understood and achieved the learning intention (or outcome).

When students in the classroom know what they are working towards, it makes the direction of learning much easier for them to understand, even if they don't quite get it all the time.

  How do we help our kids set daily intentions?

  What criteria do we have? 

I guess the first thing we really need to understand is -  

What is an intention?  An intention is a thought, a thing intended, an aim or a plan.

Over the years, I noticed a pattern of behaviour about how kids would enter the classroom and start their day.

It usually went one of three ways - either happy and joyful OR neither good nor bad, just a ho-hum, another day at school kind of emotion OR something else like upset or frustration from something that may have happened before coming to school.

So earlier in the year, I decided to try something different. I decided to see if I could help change the direction of the day before it even started by coming up with a plan or setting some intentions!

It started simply with a statement and a question - expressed with much excitement of course!

"Good Morning Year 1. I have got a feeling today is going to be an amazing day! Does anyone else have that same feeling?"

Of course, kids being the great mimics that they are - respond with hands up and the majority of the group responding with "me!"

Then I would get the kids to stand and use their body to say - Today is going to be a fantastic day!  Many varieties of this followed over the days. 

Then we introduced a whole range of vocab words to replace 'good'.

We had - amazing, sensational, joyful, ecstatic, magnificent, incredible, awesome, brilliant, extraordinary - to name just a few!

A short while later, my teaching partner asked me why it took me 10 minutes to mark the morning roll - when really it should only take a few minutes! Here is why...

After spending a couple of months setting our intentions, the following started happening without my prompting....

I would say - Good Morning (insert child's name!)

The responses I started getting were - Good Morning Mrs Johnson, I hope you have an ecstatic and joyful day today! To which I responded back! How could I not?!

This was not just from one or two kids! This was from MOST of the 24 kids I teach.(Thus, taking me longer than normal to mark the roll!)

Interestingly enough, we started talking about how we would like our day to go and how we wanted to feel and more often than not - it was usually the result.

Our days are not perfect - but then again, nothing ever is! But the joy I saw in our classroom increased significantly when we discussed our intentions.

• When you FIRST open your eyes in the morning, can you set YOUR intention for how you would like your morning or day to be? What kind of before school feeling would you like?

(It's not always going to happen smoothly! I get that! I totally understand that some mornings are crazy and chaotic...but in amongst that - if we know how we intend to feel, it may help it to be LESS chaotic!)

• How do you want your child to feel about their morning and day when they first wake up? 
• What other words or phrases can you come up with to help set the intention for your children? (Add some in the comment section below!)

Examples for you - 

* Today I am going to have a playful day! * Today is going to be a fun day of adventure and learning! * Today is going to be awesome because... * Today I am going to be brave and make new friends! * Today is going to be fantastic because I get to try again at...

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.

You can steer yourself, in any direction you choose! - Dr Seuss

Until next week....have a conscious and mindful week!

Clarissa xo