This activity is excellent for restoring the importance of our breathing to the mind. Ask your students to think of a relaxing color and another color that represents anger, frustration, or sadness. An easy way for children to immerse their toes in mindfulness is through body postures. To get your children excited, tell them that doing fun poses can help them feel strong, courageous, and happy.
Abdominal breathing is an excellent activity for students to practice staying calm during stressful situations. Centervention has a complete lesson plan that you can use about abdominal breathing. You'll find everything from pre-discussion and post-discussion questions to step-by-step instructions. It's a wonderful relaxing activity to use when students need to cool down or need an emotional regulation strategy.
This free Sesame Street app isn't specific to meditation, but it's great for introducing younger children to the concept of calming down through breathing. The app teaches children the “Breathe, Think, Do” method. Children help an animated monster faced with a frustrating situation to calm down by breathing deeply and for a long time. The app is free and available for Android and iOS.
As mentioned in this blog, calming corners can help reduce student stress and provide relaxing visual, auditory and tactile experiences for students to de-stress. A relaxing corner is a place that can help your students prepare to learn and concentrate throughout the day. The relaxing corner can be a physical corner of your classroom or a virtual space. There are many strategies, daily routines, and mindfulness practices that we can implement in our class to remedy negative emotions and difficulties in school life.
Here are 25 suggestions that we recommend you try in your classroom to reduce social anxiety, restlessness and improve your students' learning experience. Sometimes our students need a moment to recover and recover from the chaos of the school day. Designate a corner of your classroom as a quiet space where someone can come and sit. Provide headphones and a music device with relaxing music or sounds of nature that they can use to escape for a moment.
Ask your students to keep a diary of their mental and physical sensations, guided by a message they can write on the blackboard. Set aside time before each lesson to reflect on how they're feeling, release tension, and gain clarity so they can learn carefully. Creating a mindfulness jar can be a mindfulness exercise in and of itself. Ask your students to bring a glass jar to class and small objects of different colors and meanings that they consider important and relevant.
Ask them to place their items inside their jars, then you can add water and glycerin to make the objects move and float. Guided images help children concentrate better, while sensory activities help them relax. Breathing is also a mindfulness activity that will help children calm their minds and focus on the project at hand. Every student should have a stuffed animal or a tennis ball to rest on their stomach.
Set a stopwatch and, for a certain period of time, students should close their eyes and breathe slowly and deeply while keeping the plush doll or ball in their stomachs. If the object falls, they can simply put it back and keep breathing. The goal is to keep the focus on breathing and to balance the object for a certain amount of time. The main purpose of mindfulness is to help the mind focus on the current moment, while eliminating stressors.
I've had the opportunity to see a lot of mindfulness practices in action in schools and to talk to several master's teachers in mindfulness. Doing so provides a delightful focal point for the mind and develops the capacity for stillness and conscious concentration. Mindfulness research shows that it helps students with attention, emotional regulation, compassion and calm, according to Mindful Schools. .
