65. How to Structure a Mindfulness Practice Into Your School Day

Are you thinking of starting a mindfulness practice in your classroom, but you’re not sure where to start?

Follow these 4 easy steps and as a result, you and your students will thrive in a calm learning atmosphere.

1. Schedule mindfulness into your timetable. It doesn’t matter when you do it, what matters is that you keep the very same routine every day.

Routine and structure are so important when it comes to student learning. When you teach mindfulness every day, students aren’t just exposed to strategies that will help them to manage their emotions and behaviours, they begin to actually use the skills they are learning independently.

2. Create the expectations for the mindfulness practice with your students.

Most of your students have never done a mindfulness practice, so it’s up to you to be clear on what they can do to have success. Explain the importance of listening actively to the Educalme audio guided practices and decide as a class what active listening looks like, sounds like and feels like. We recommend displaying the expectations in your classroom and reviewing them daily as your students are learning this new practice.

3. Listen to the audio guided mindfulness practice in our Introduction to Mindfulness program with your students.

You don’t have time to waste searching through YouTube to find a practice that is age-appropriate and the correct length. That’s why we’ve created a month-long series of 5-minute audio guided mindfulness practices that work in a classroom. It’s available in both English and French and it’s FREE! Click here to access it now!

For younger grades, listen to audio 1 for a week and then move onto audio 2 the following week. Continue until you’ve used all 5 audios. For older grades, listen to audio 1 on Monday, audio 2 on Tuesday and so on. Repeat for at least 1 month.

Be sure to sit and practice with your students, it’s important that you model what mindfulness looks like since it’s brand new to them.

4. Reflect as a class. Have a sharing circle and ask your students, what did you notice during today’s mindfulness practice? OR use the booklet provided in our Introduction to Mindfulness.

Reflection and discussion helps students to understand how mindfulness helps them and to envision how it can help them when they’re facing a challenging emotion or situation.

Now, you’re all set to start a mindfulness practice in your classroom!

Click here to get our FREE ready-to-use bilingual (English and French) Introduction to Mindfulness unit in Educalme.

Enjoy!

With calm and appreciation,

Kailey and Josianne

Dive deeper into this topic by listening to the following episode of The Balanced Educator Podcast: