Fostering Peace Skills in Youth Through Representation
In today’s diverse and media-heavy world, the power of representation is greater than ever, particularly for youth. Representation extends beyond visibility and helps teach youth valuable life skills. Media representation refers to how the media portrays groups or individuals with different characteristics. It refers to how some aspects such as gender, age, ethnicity, physical ability, […]
Using the Enneagram as a Tool for Empathy
I’ve never had much interest in personality tests, until I was introduced to the Enneagram of Personality by a close friend (and former TREE facilitator!) around five years ago. Since then, it’s something that I reflect on often as a way to have a deeper understanding of myself and to have a stronger understanding of […]
Three Approaches for Helping Children with their Emotions
Learning different ways to help children understand and deal with their emotions is very important. It is crucial to help children manage their emotions, as they are a regular aspect of the human experience, and learning to understand and regulate them is critical for their overall well-being. It sets the foundation for lifelong emotional well-being. […]
Mindful Eating
Mindfulness is a large part of our TREE curriculum, where students are encouraged to practice various mindfulness techniques to manage their emotions. In my experience, the toughest part about introducing the concept of mindfulness is the idea that it requires a lot of time or perfect stillness to reap the benefits. On the contrary, mindfulness […]
Connecting with Nature Mindfully
I took up gardening a couple of years ago in an attempt to eat healthier and circumvent the rising cost of fresh produce at the grocery store. What I gained through that experience has been a reconnection, not only with the natural environment, but with myself. The routine of watering, weeding, and harvesting the vegetables […]
The Rewards of Celebrating Differences
One of the TREE workshops that I facilitated in the last session was with a Grade 1/2 split class, using the TREE Grade 2 curriculum. I really enjoyed working with the students and their teacher, since they were nice students who listened quite well and had high participation in group activities. But of course, some […]
Building Empathy
In the fourth week of TREE’s Grade 3 Conflict Resolution curriculum, the focus is on Empathy. How to build empathy for another person, and how to show empathy to another person. At the beginning of the class, the students are asked to share some of the feelings that they have experienced before. Everything from sad, […]
Setting Boundaries for Healthy Conversations
Being able to change the subject mid-conversation is really more of an art than anything else; being able to redirect a conversation is useful and powerful. No matter how gracefully you might be able to change the subject, there are some topics that come up again and again that you might not be in the […]
When Small Conflicts Feel Big
We all have a window of tolerance for managing stress, conflicts and challenges in any moment. In the best of times, we have a greater window of capacity to tolerate these stressors. At times, however, there will be stressors that shrink that window. It could be a big change, like moving to a new city, academic […]
Managing Conflict in Times of Stress
In times of high stress or anxiety, we respond in very different ways (see also: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn); some of us are extroverts, some are introverts, some people process internally by processing over time, others process externally by talking things through with others. All of these are exceptionally valid ways of navigating our […]
