Brain Fitness Immersion for Senior Primary Students: A total Community Experience

We will present the latest national research on resilience, showing how Australians are currently suffering unprecedented rates of developing mental health problems, especially throughout the CoVID-19 pandemic. Building a health and wellbeing curriculum is therefore a social imperative to educate and promote positive growth, which serves not only to mitigate mental ill-health, but also foster greater neural capacity for learning outcomes and overall student success.

In this session, delegates will be given theoretical context of the new Neural Resilience Model, PR6, including the online assessment tool, demonstrating the impact of stress on the brain and how this interferes with the learning pathways. We will briefly explore the triune brain model [in a way which can also be presented to students], and the interplay of certain neurotransmitters in relation to learning. An overview to the main areas of the brain that highly align to resilience will be presented and how we can teach these concepts to children up to middle school, to provide the impetus for regulatory behaviours around motivation and attention.
Character resources have been created by a team of educators to teach brain-based strategies to young children as a prevention against developing mental health problems. The characters take a narrative approach to help children understand the function of their brains under stress and what they can do to manage their body’s responses. The characters represent scientific strategies and enable children to apply them with confidence and meaning. These strategies are scientifically aligned with the latest research in Neural Resilience, which underpins adaptive behaviours and fosters social development. Some of the areas covered in the narratives include, exercise, sleep hygiene, self-regulation and optimism.
Examples will show a whole school approach and footage of what it could look like within educational settings.