Powerfully You
Learning to Notice Your Body Sensations
By Amy Lewis and Heather Spann
Illustrated by Bethany Weart
NEW BOOK NOW AVAILABLE!
Powerfully You
Learning to Use Tools
By Amy Lewis and Heather Spann
Illustrated by Bethany Weart and Emma Cohen
Powerfully You: Learning to Notice Your Body Sensations
is designed to be used by anyone as a introduction to the concepts of body sensations, activation, and making a match match. It can also be utilized as a supplementary tool for trained providers using the Powerfully You curriculum.
Powerfully You: Learning to Notice Your Body Sensations uses simple illustrations and repetition to introduce the concepts to younger learners, and can also be used to reinforce concepts for older learners. Learning to Notice your Body Sensations is useful for individuals, small groups, or in classrooms. The end of the book also includes song lyrics to a familiar tune to further extend the learning.
The book begins by teaching body sensing and vocabulary about body sensations. There is an emphasis on noticing body sensations that are important when we are identifying our body’s own activation level. The book highlights the concept that no levels of activation are good or bad, but are just a match or a mismatch for the situation we are in.
Currently available in paperback and on Kindle through Amazon.
Powerfully You: Learning to Use Tools
This is the second book published to support the Powerfully You curriculum. Our first book, Learning to Notice Your Body Sensations, introduces body sensing. Teaching children to be mindfully aware of body sensations (noticing them with compassion, curiosity, and without judgement) enables them to become more self-aware.
By creating awareness and using tools to shift their level of activation, we build a child’s capacity for self-regulation. Research shows that increasing body awareness and self-regulatory capacity leads to improvements in emotional mastery, in children and adults.
Both books are designed for the adult to actively engage and pause with your listeners, to explore their awareness of body sensations. This second book focuses on introducing evidence informed tools that occupational therapists often recommend, based on the science of sensory integrative processing.
Providing connection and co-regulation is still the most important thing we can do. Co-regulation is sharing our own ability to self-regulate with the child through warm, connected interactions. Tools are always most effective when provided in relationship with your child. When we can bring our best to the child, we enable the child to bring their best to the world.
Additional Ideas For Using
Powerfully You: Learning to Notice Your Body Sensations
Actively engage with your learner and experience each concept that is being presented on the page.
We all learn best through interactive experiences. For example, when you are blowing the pinwheel encourage the students to blow as long as they can and imagine they can keep the pinwheel spinning. Some learners may need you to exaggerate each page and act it out with them to really begin to experience each sensation.
Read the book once and then go back to play and experiment with one concept at a time.
For example, a student might need to just explore feeling their breath and noticing when it is “short and fast” and “slow and long”. Stay with that concept for a few days or a week and allow them to experience the difference of the two sensations through play. For example, comparing sensations when they are playing outside versus when they are sitting with their adult reading a book. This is sometimes taught best by the adult observing and drawing attention to what the child may be experiencing…. “You are really playing hard right now, and I notice you are breathing short and fast.” Grade the pace of concepts, exploration of vocabulary, and experiential awareness to your student’s needs.
Adapt the learning experiences as needed.
For example, if your student is having trouble feeling their heartbeat, offer to help them find their pulse on their neck or even to feel yours. Remember to keep them moving for about 30 seconds doing an activity that makes their heart pump harder so that it is easier to feel.
Encourage your child or student to share their individual thoughts and experiences in active discussions after or during the book.
The book utilizes the power of repetition, carefully chosen words, and simple graphics. You can also engage your child or student by encouraging them to use different words to describe their own body sensations. Use the pictures to spark conversations. For example: “This girl is running and playing soccer and feels super activated. What is something you do that might make your heart beat fast and hard, etc.? What does that feel like in your body?” Help the students take the concepts and connect them to meaningful moments in their own lived experiences.
Have fun and enjoy introducing the vocabulary and concepts to the students in your own creative way.
Some students may need more visuals and tactile exploration to feel “soft muscles” like exploring cooked spaghetti noodles and “hard muscles” as uncooked spaghetti noodles. Bring in a real pinwheel or other breath tools like blowing cotton balls, party blow-out toys, or ball pipes to have students practice feeling a long and slow breath versus a short and fast one.
For older learners, consider allowing the opportunity for the student to read and share with a younger peer or adults in their lives.
This can be an opportunity for the student to share the concepts they learned in the full curriculum with another person in their life. For example, a sixth-grader asked to share the book with his resource teacher so she could understand some of the words he used to describe making a match. He then followed up by taking the book and adapting it for his family to understand by making a private YouTube video for them. Research reminds us that teaching concepts to others is an extremely effective way of learning. When students are able to share their knowledge, it empowers them to advocate for themself.
Use the book as an example and let your students create their own body sensing and activation story.
Let them draw and illustrate times where they are a match and maybe even a time where they aren’t. Remember to emphasize that no activation is good or bad, just a match or a mismatch. This is a concept that is worthy of being repeated for the student and the adults in their lives.
Use the song to reinforce the concepts during play.
Young children use repetition in songs to begin to remember concepts and expand their language capacities. Adults can support them by narrating what they notice in the child’s body, but the child may be limited in their own awareness and rely on the adult’s narration to start noticing body sensations.
The song gives a scaffolding option to allow easier access for some students. For example, a young girl has difficulty remembering the concepts but can sing the song to help remember what body sensations she wants to notice and the descriptive words she is looking for to describe those sensations. There is so much therapeutic power in music found in its rhythm and repetition for learning and connection.
