A powerful SEL mindfulness program to help kids self-regulate, foster social and academic engagement, and bring peace back into the classroom. As a teacher, you know that preschool and kindergarten are difficult periods of transition in kids’ lives. This is true now more than ever, as young children in our world face increasing life challenges—including adverse childhood experiences, trauma, social disconnection, systematic discrimination, and a global pandemic. Students are struggling to balance their emotions and adapt to a classroom environment, the tools outlined in this mindfulness guide can help. Mindfulness for Preschool and Kindergarten offers an effective, adaptable, multisensory, and skills-based social emotional learning (SEL) program to help preschool and kindergarten-aged children learn to self-regulate, ensuring a peaceful and prosocial learning environment in the classroom. The hands-on OpenMind program in this book will help kids cope with stress and trauma, process and understand difficult emotions, and interact positively with others. Kids will also learn how to bounce back from challenges, build resilience, and experience greater social and academic engagement. The OpenMind program’s five foundations go well beyond sequenced lesson plans and strategies to help promote a positive classroom experience. These include: Wellness and mindfulness training for teachers - Practices to help kids build self-regulation, executive function, and engagement - Planned practices and lessons in response to arising individual and learning environment needs that are anchored to social and academic content - Scaffolding and modification of practices and lessons to promote learning and active mindful engagement - A process for transforming challenging behaviors into opportunities for learning, growth, autonomy, and agency   You are on the frontlines of helping kids face some of life’s most difficult challenges, and ensuring that they feel valued, protected, and supported. The weight of this responsibility can create stress and feelings of overwhelm for you. Let this guide support both you and your young students in cultivating a loving, safe, and rewarding classroom environment—together. “Those of us educated in eons past were taught a lot about chemistry and history, but nothing at all about the nature of our minds. Yet it is the human mind that’s responsible for both compassion but also great cruelty. Today however we are at the crest of an increasingly powerful wave to help children understand their minds and how to live to be helpful not harmful to themselves and others. Monica Jackman’s OpenMind Preschool and Kindergarten (OMPK) Program is a wonderful contribution to this effort. She indicates many ways in which we can help children understand themselves that could be integrated into the school program and be a source for regular practice and guidance. Her program makes a significant contribution to one of the greatest challenges of humanity: the moral and compassionate education of young minds.” —Paul Gilbert , author of Compassionate Mind and Living like Crazy ; professor of clinical psychology at the University of Derby; visiting professor at the University of Queensland, Australia; and president of the Compassionate Mind Foundation (www.compassionatemind.co.uk) “Using a developmentally appropriate and student-centered approach, this book offers practices for very young children that build their social-emotional learning (SEL) skills using mindfulness as the backdrop. There is also a meaty chapter detailing mindfulness practices for educators, recognizing that teaching these skills involves embodiment of a mindful way of being. This is a must-read for anyone working with young children!” —Deborah Schussler, EdD , professor of education at Pennsylvania State University, and faculty affiliate of Prevention Research Center and Rock Ethics Institute “An authentic and nuanced approach to mindfulness for young children, Jackman offers an in-depth, comprehensive program to improve children’s ability to engage and learn in the classroom. Different from other SEL programs, OMPK integrates creative, developmentally appropriate, and meaningful activities throughout the day, contextualized so that they ‘make sense’ to kids. Providing an abundant array of different activities for different situations and learners, Jackman makes implementing OMPK an easy lift for teachers. A truly terrific gift for our youngest learners and their teachers!” —Karen Bluth, PhD , assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; author of The Self-Compassion Workbook for Teens and The Self-Compassionate Teen ; and coauthor of Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Teen ADHD “This book is a precious resource for early childhood educators who wish to teach students fundamental skills of attentional focus, self-regulation, and mindful awareness that underlie and support learning, social relationships, an