Mindful Arts in the Classroom: Stories and Creative Activities for Social and Emotional Learning

Written especially for the teacher or camp director who wants to bring mindfulness, social and emotional learning (SEL), and the arts into their busy day through storytelling and fun games, this book offers a complete course that helps kids identify and talk about their feelings, self-regulate and self-soothe when stressed, and learn from easy mindfulness practices.

Educator and theater director Andrew Nance is the author of the popular children's book Puppy Mind, which brought a new dimension of cuteness to the practice of mindfulness in the form of a rambunctious, playful puppy. In this book, Nance brings the puppy and a host of other friendly characters into the classroom to animate a 21-lesson curriculum centered around lively stories and easy-to-lead exercises for young students from kindergarten to third grade. Nance offers a teacher's guide to arts-based mindfulness exercises utilizing story-telling, theater games, and drawing to spark students' self-expression, self-awareness, and social and emotional well-being.

Andrew Jordan Nance has been an educator for more than twenty-five years. He is the founder of Mindful Arts San Francisco, whose mission is to provide volunteer mindful educators to teach at underserved San Francisco schools. Nance is also an award-winning actor and director. For almost thirty years he taught performing arts to students from diverse backgrounds, and for eighteen years he was the Conservatory Director at San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre Center. He is on the board of directors of several educational nonprofit organizations including the Mindful Life Project in Richmond, California; San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theater Center; and Arts Ed Matters, a California-based arts-integration organization. Andrew Jordan Nance lives in San Francisco.