Dear Morningside Center Friends,

The summer is in full swing—and Morningside has your back no matter the season! 

With a little ‘winding down’ energy this week, we’re sharing SEL Tips for ease, an updated and expanded climate change fiction guide, and a blog post about self-care from Morningside's Director of Strategic Partnerships, Dionne Grayman.

Enjoy these sunny days with resources of calm and support!

A Little Teapot

Self-care is about more than candles and Epsom salt baths and exercise and sleep and saying no, says Dionne Grayman. 

My first offering to you is to be gentle with yourself and give yourself “grace” (yet another term that some folks are struggling with because IT has also become a thing). Simply, don’t beat yourself up for messing up, missing a step, not knowing everything. Those self-talk strategies that you’ve been sharing with your students also apply to you. Read more.

New & Featured on TeachableMoment

Climate Change Fiction: An Updated Annotated Bibliography (July 2025)

An updated and expanded guide of fiction to engage your students in an imaginative exploration of the climate crisis. Explore:

• Climate Poetry for Teaching
• Climate Short Stories for Teaching
• Climate Novels for Teaching
• Climate Fiction: Dystopias and Allegories
• Climate Movies

Using Self Talk to Calm Down

By maintaining our calm in stressful, triggering situations, we educators can set a positive tone in the classroom, send a comforting message to our students, and maintain full access to the problem-solving part of our brain so that we can make appropriate choices in the moment. 

SEL Tip: Practice gratitude as a form of self-care 

Being an educator is stressful – in fact, it’s one of the most stressful professions in the country. No wonder so many educators are looking for ways to combat our stress, or at least take it down a notch. Research shows that one way to do this is to cultivate gratitude as a nurturing self-care practice. Gratitude can reduce stress and reshape the brain. Here are two steps for practicing it.

What We're Reading

Intentionally Planning for Family and Community Engagement

"To create this kind of community, we shape our annual calendar to include opportunities for authentic family and community engagement and events that celebrate our students outside of their classroom accomplishments." By Ranjani Iyer & Meghan Blakeman at Edutopia

Lawsuit challenges Trump administration’s $7 billion education funding freeze

"Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia are suing the Trump administration to restore billions in education funding that the federal government abruptly froze the day before those funds were supposed to be released." By Erica Meltzer at Chalkbeat

America’s child care system relies on immigrants. Without them, it could collapse

"Nationwide, immigrants make up nearly 20 percent of the child care workforce. In New York City, immigrants make up more than 40 percent of the child care workforce. In Los Angeles, it’s nearly 50 percent." By Jackie Mader at the Hechinger Report

"The listening. The kids listen to each other now. They're practicing listening during 4Rs time and it's this really special time to them so they're really invested in listening to it during that time, and then using similar language - 'it's group time, we're together, we're listening to each other' - we're doing math talk and social studies talk and reading talk and they really are talking more, sharing more ideas, and listening to each other, all throughout the academic areas as well." 

—Molly Heekin, 2nd grade teacher