Proposal

Mrs. Amy Boutilier

Sport and Medical Sciences Academy

280 Huyshope Avenue

Hartford, CT 06106

Dear Mrs.Boutilier:

For my capstone I decided to teach children mindfulness and coping skills, I would be conducting anonymous scales to assess stress, depression and or anxiety in the children then according to those will teach camping skills and other activities along with mindfulness meditation videos. I also will be having them keep a reflection journal to write how they felt before and after to track any progress made along with which exercises helped them individually. I chose this because my family in some of their professions use meditation and mindfulness to help their patients and help them over some or deal with trauma they might have been through in their lives. I am planning to do this project at Kinsella in Hartford with the younger children at their school or google meet or zoom, I want to work with children on this because as they grow older they are going to deal with stressful situations or a traumatic event that these skills would be very useful for and good skills to have for school or a job. I will  be conducting this project at Kinsella in Hartford, CT with a class of second graders.

The question I chose to write was how the effects of mindfulness and meditation on children. My research question and the project relate because I would be giving the kids anonymous surveys for mood, anxiety, and depression to see which meditations, activities and coping skills should be demonstrated. Each time I go in to work with the kids I would be giving the surveys to serve as my data to see what is working and what they are benefiting from or what needs to be tweaked along with what is beneficial or not. I plan on collecting dated surveys, which would be  anonymous, to see progress of the children along with what benefited them and what did not so that we can see what actually works as well as things from the activities I do with the children such as drawing their emotions before and after the meditations.

As for a mentor, I was able to get Kirsten Larson willing to help me on this amazing journey. She is a MFT/A Clinician and practices mindfulness and meditation on her own time along with including it into her clients cases. In the end of this I want to look back and see how far I pushed myself for the better, whether that’d be with being more comfortable in social settings or being more involved in my community and helping my city more. I know this project will push me to these goals because I’m a very reserved person and although I do like helping others and  being able to provide for people, I usually find it hard to break away from being shy and being able to come out and do what needs to be done because of social anxieties. My learning Stretch is to become better at public speaking and being more comfortable with sharing my work and knowledge with others.

Sincerely,

Makayla S. Bruno