The MindUP Curriculum: Grades PreK - 2 Paperback – Illustrated, March 1, 2011

I am a second grade teacher with 27 wonderful years of experience. This is by far one of the most intelligently written programs I have seen to aid in the social and emotional development of children. I piloted the program this year and found the lessons and activities engaging for the students, and easy to implement for the teacher. The children learned so much about their brains, the way they think and process, and how to optimize the use of their brains and senses. I taught the program right before standardized state testing, and it greatly helped the students focus and feel calm during a stressful two weeks. I also incorporated the lessons as part of our community service unit. It fit in beautifully! I think all students, grade K-12, would benefit from the simple, yet powerful, ideas and skills put forth by the MindUp creators.The only suggestion I would have is to actually expand the lessons to be more step-by-step, with lists of materials to have ready. It took quite a bit of work to plan out, prepare and script out what I was going to teach. I would suggest the authors look to a program like Second Step or FOSS to make the program more teacher-friendly and to make sure all suggested resources are readily available (many books are out of print). Perhaps online teacher videos such as FOSS has would be beneficial?Nevertheless, these are minor flaws. The $25 I spent for the book made it the cheapest, best professional program I have ever purchased! I HIGHLY recommend it to all teachers concerned about the development of the whole child. BRAVO!

As a Special Educator who is also trained as an Occupational Therapist, I must say this is a super resource ( prek to 2) and I am so excited to use it. The book is chock full of information and suggests ways to present it to the children in ways that can be understood. Yes the brain has many complex parts but that is why you give the parts nicknames that represent them..like the amygdala is the "security guard".. you could do so many additional things to make the brain parts understandable by using props and visual representations to go with the complex jargon. Since the book provided so many additional suggestions for other pieces of literature to support the ideas of mindful seeing, smelling, tasting, etc. I am able to use it across curriculum in language arts and hit on science through our 5 senses. Working with young children it is obvious that children's bodies and brains are different today than they were even 5 years ago, an epidemic of children who are totally disconnected to the concept of being mindful and I think unless we begin to intentionally teach this it's going to be another skill our children miss out on in this fast paced world they live in... Reasonably priced and easy to read...Kudos to Scholastic and The Hawn Foundation. Hopefully sooner rather than later our educational system will embrace children as more than the sum of their test scores!

I actually bought the 3-5 version from a Scholastic Book order and then found out I was changing grade levels to 2nd grade for next year. So I came to Amazon and bought the K-2 version. They are different enough that I didn't want to try to adapt down.I have to say I am very pleasantly surprised with this resource. The information is interesting and I'm sure children will enjoy learning about how their brains work. The activities to help solidify what you are teaching children about how to be "mindful" (in a very simplified explanation, mindful is REALLY paying attention and being aware of your surroundings) and the journal activities and literature links are great. One of the activities suggests using an "I Spy" book to help children practice mindful seeing. I loathe those books most of the time because I really want my students to READ during reading but this is an activity that will truly allow children to enjoy the books they like but also understand how much more we notice when we pay attention to a certain thing.The book includes a big full-color poster of the brain and points out the parts of the brain that you are teaching about. There are also some reproducibles to go along with some of the activities that are included in the book. For me personally, the journal activities and literature connections made this resource worth the price.