“If we know about our brains, we know about ourselves,” a Queens middle school student told more than 200 of his peers gathered at the Queens County Farm Museum in Glen Oaks on a beautiful spring morning.

He was reflecting on the neuroscience workshop that the students, representing nine Queens middle schools, had participated in while sprawled on the grass on their new, UFT-branded blankets. It was the fourth annual Let’s Talk About It event sponsored by the UFT’s Member Assistance Program in collaboration with partner UFT programs MindUP and Teacher Center.

Students learned about the anatomy and functions of their brains during the MindUP-led neuroscience workshop, then took a hayride around the farm to meet the goats, cows and chickens. They ended the day with a mindfulness activity focusing on the five senses.

“Through the tour of the farm, my students were using their five senses,” Jennifer Andres, a teacher at PS/IS 266 in Queens, said of the April 16 event. “It made sense to ground themselves in the earth, with the sun and the grass around them. Nature is grounding.”

Well-grounded students make for well-grounded classrooms, said Tina Puccio, the director of the UFT’s Member Assistance Program. “If we want our teachers to be happy in the classroom, then we need their students to be healthy,” said Puccio. The Member Assistance Program typically provides mental health services and programming for educators, but Let’s Talk About It is the program’s flagship student event, which is held in a different borough each year. Puccio hopes it will create a “domino effect” of well-being in schools that “doesn’t end at the farm but lasts through the school year and into the summer.”

The day of fun at the farm was also a day of learning, noted UFT Vice President for Education Mary Vaccaro. “We need to learn tools to achieve mental well-being,” she said, and “learning can be fun.”