In our experience, once teachers finally decide to implement a mindfulness practice in their classroom, they wished they would have done it much, much earlier.
Because a daily mindfulness practice gives your students the tools, strategies and common vocabulary to manage emotions and behaviours.
For most teachers, it always comes back to the fear or the hurdle in getting started, being afraid to be doing “wrong”, or just not being sure how to start this and introduce it in the classroom.
If you would like a simple way to introduce mindfulness to your students in early and middle years before diving into Educalme Classroom, we’ve got a great pre-teaching activity!
To make a sparkle jar, grab a jar, add sparkles, a little bit of liquid dish or hand soap and fill almost to the top with water. Seal the jar well. You may even want to glue it shut, depending on if you will allow students to use the sparkle jar or not and the age of your students.
You’ll be using the sparkle jar to explain that when we as humans are experiencing a big emotion, it’s like we’ve shaken up a sparkle jar in our mind. It becomes difficult to see clearly and make good decisions.
When we take a moment to let the sparkles settle, we feel more calm, our mind becomes clear and we can make good decisions.
We’ve got the entire step-by-step lesson plan laid out for you here – In this document, we explain how to introduce mindfulness to early, middle and high school ages!
If you want to start a classroom mindfulness practice with your students, take it a step further and use our ready-to-use online mindfulness program, Educalme.
Get unlimited access to the first unit of the Educalme online mindfulness program that is transforming classrooms and improving student wellness and learning. You will have access to mindfulness lessons for the classroom for a whole month (audios & printables). No prep required!
To go even deeper on this topic, listen to our episode on The Balanced Educator Podcast below.
Be sure to subscribe to the Balanced Educator Podcast so you don’t miss our upcoming episodes as we continue to teach how to avoid teacher burnout. iTunes, Spotify, Google Play
How to Structure a Mindfulness Practice Into Your School Day
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Let us know in the comments, how do you practice mindfulness in your classroom?
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