More Resources:

Check out these apps & links to find more exercises and mindfulness resources:

Annaka Harris’ Guided Mediation for Children: For children ages 6-10, includes mindful hearing, mindful seeing, mindful breathing, and friendly wishes exercises.

These Apps are also great for getting started:

  • Mindfulness for Children: Meditations for Kids App

  • Smiling Minds App

  • Still Quiet Place

Mindfulness Training Classes for Children:

  • The “Wellness Works in Schools” course is one such class, which has been shown to result in increased self-regulation and executive function (Garey, 2017).

  • The Hawn Foundation’s MindUP curriculum is also a useful tool for teaching mindfulness to children (Garey, 2017). These courses can help children learn how to manage their stress as they grow up.

  • There is also a popular course called “MonkeyMind and Me: A Mindfulness Course for Children.” Children learn how to meditate and practice mindfulness over eight one hour sessions held over eight weeks. The lessons are delivered through stories about MonkeyMind, a friendly puppet who has trouble with self-regulation (“MonkeyMind and Me”, 2017). The course includes lessons, opportunities to practice, design of a homemade project, and a graduation ceremony.

More Exercises

Check your personal weather report:

In Sitting Still Like a Frog, Eline Snel encourages children to “summon the weather report that best describes [their] feelings at the moment.” Sunny, rainy, stormy, calm, windy, tsunami? This activity allows children to observe their present state without overly identifying with their emotions. They can’t change the weather outside, and we can’t change our emotions or feelings either. All we can change is how we relate to them. As Snel describes it, children can recognize, “I am not the downpour, but I notice that it is raining; I am not a scaredy-cat, but I realize that sometimes I have this big scared feeling somewhere near my throat.”

Mindful Posing:

One easy way for children to dip their toes into mindfulness is through body poses. To get your kids excited, tell them that doing fun poses can help them feel strong, brave, and happy.

Have the kids go somewhere quiet and familiar, a place they feel safe. Next, tell them to try one of the following poses:

  1. The Superman: this pose is practiced by standing with the feet just wider than the hips, fists clenched, and arms reached out to the sky, stretching the body as tall as possible.

  2. The Wonder Woman: this pose is struck by standing tall with legs wider than hip-width apart and hands or fists placed on the hips (Karen Young, 2017).

Safari

The Safari exercise is a great way to help kids learn mindfulness. This activity turns an average, everyday walk into an exciting new adventure.

Tell your kids that you will be going on a safari: their goal is to notice as many birds, bugs, creepy-crawlies, and any other animals as they can. Anything that walks, crawls, swims, or flies is of interest, and they’ll need to focus all of their senses to find them, especially the little ones (Karen Young, 2017).

A similar exercise for adults is the mindfulness walk. This exercise provokes the same response in children that a mindful walk elicits in adults: a state of awareness and grounding in the present.

If you’re interested in more information on how to encourage the practice of mindfulness in children and teens, you can check out the other exercises from this website. Otherwise, head on to the next section where we lay out key tips for teaching these concepts.