Mindful Coloring for Kids: Help Your Students Self-Regulate

There are so many great ideas for classroom mindfulness activities! Today, we want to talk to you about one of our favorites: mindful coloring (and hint: we’ll have some free mindful coloring pages for you and your students linked in this post!).

What is Mindful Coloring?

Mindful coloring is simply coloring in the present moment. In mindful coloring, a person focuses fully on coloring. When thoughts of the past or the future pop up in their mind, they can simply recognize that they are no longer in the present moment, and then refocus their attention on mindful coloring.

Why Mindful Coloring?

Mindful coloring is one of the greatest calm classroom activities! It’s a simple social-emotional learning activity that can help all members of the classroom (including you, the teacher!) find calm and focus, and get the brain and body ready for effective teaching and learning.

Mindful coloring helps to relieve stress, anxiety, and overwhelm. It helps students with self-regulation. It helps the brain and the body to feel more relaxed.

With kids, it’s a great way to do mindfulness because students tend to get more out of visual classroom mindfulness exercises!

How to Incorporate Mindful Coloring Into Your School Day

There are many ways to color mindfully with your students. Here are a few ideas:

• As students are coming in first thing in the morning, get them into the classroom routine of settling in and then coloring mindfully until announcements. Not only will you create a calm classroom environment from the first few minutes of class, you will also get your students into a state where they are ready for learning.
• Color mindfully in transition moments! Classroom transitions are always tough, so slow them down by getting students to color mindfully for 2 to 5 minutes between subjects or any other type of transition you experience with your students.
• Use mindful coloring sheets as an early finishers activity! When students are done with their assignment, get them to color mindfully while they wait for their classmates to complete their work.
• Add them to your calm down corner so students can grab a mindfulness coloring page when needed!

Create a calm classroom environment with free mindfulness coloring pages for kids and bonus mindfulness posters!

Best part of this blog post? Our free mindful coloring pages resource for K-12 classrooms! (This link contains other free classroom mindfulness resources as well!)

This resource contains 5 mindful coloring sheets with growth mindset positive affirmations, and 5 matching mindfulness posters that can be used for your bulletin board (yay for calm classroom decor!):

• I am calm.
• I am strong.
• I am kind.
• I am capable.
• I can do hard things.

Get your free growth mindset & mindfulness coloring sheets (+ posters) now!

Enjoy coloring mindfully with your students!

With appreciation,

Kailey and Josianne

Teachers & Educalme Founders

Share this post on Pinterest so other teachers can get their mindful coloring pages too!