After today's morning experience and the afternoon cross division discussion time, I had the following idea:

Issue: In Lower School, two 4th graders each week, write their own prompt with Alice Moore's assistance. This seems well received by the rest of LS - they get quiet and seem to listen and follow the prompt as best they can. It sounded to me like this is the same procedure used in US assemblies but with less of a positive reception (more talking and general unsettledness, or a sense of it being rote and students not really getting mindful).

My Idea: Building from the student -inspired prompts in LS (which could stay the same under Margot's direction); perhaps US could choose a mindfulness theme to focus on for the week or the month - then the mindfulness activities in assembly could relate to that theme - i.e. gratitude, body scanning/appreciation/acceptance; breath work with a variety of different techniques (or building on one technique), mindful eating, positive memories, positive affirmations, etc.

I think it could be helpful to find the workbooks that were used in our first deep dive into mindfulness back in 2010 - they had a lot of different mindfulness strategies, approaches and prompts that could be useful - there was a LS workbook and and US one. Also, Jimmy has the book "Teaching Mindfulness to Children" from Thich Naht Hahn.

Perhaps we could fins some summer reading books aligned with this topic as well.