Author Archives: TheMindfulnessTeacher

🌟1 minute activities for TEACHERS to practise Mindfulness with their classes🌟‬

‪#MindfulMarch 🧠‬
Tues 13th: Belly Breathing
Put your hands on your belly. As you breathe deeply in, your belly should get bigger and your hands rise. Slowly breathe out and repeat 12 times.

🌟1 minute activities for TEACHERS to practise Mindfulness with their classes🌟‬

‪#MindfulMarch 🧠‬
Mon 12th: High Five! ✋
Silently, think of 5 things you can see 👀 right now. 4 things you can hear👂3 things you can feel 🤚2 things you can smell 👃 1 thing you can taste 👅

🌟1 minute activities for TEACHERS to practise Mindfulness with their classes🌟‬

‪#MindfulMarch 🧠‬
Fri 9th: Touchy Feely 🤚

Play some calm music. Roll up your sleeves. Gently stroke or gently scratch the inside of your arm, up and down. Be as light as a feather. Does it tickle? Tingle? What did it feel like in your fingers?

Enjoy!

#MindfulMarch 🧠
7th: Silky Silence 🧘‍♀️

Ask the class to sit and close their eyes. Stay silent for 1 minute and count how many different sounds they can hear 👂
Cars? 🚗 The playground? Birds? 🐦

🌟TAG A TEACHER! 👨‍🏫 

🌟TEACHERS! Want a calmer classroom?📚 🍎Today I will start #MindfulMarch (better late then never!) where I will post a 1 minute #Mindfulnessactivity each day, for teachers to do in the classroom!

📣Follow this blog for the daily activity

#MindfulMay week 4! 🌸🌼

🌬This week is a simple breathing exercise. 

🌬Follow the diagram to breathe in for 3 seconds, hold for 3 seconds, breathe out for 3 seconds and hold again for 3 seconds. 

🌬Repeat this cycle for 1 minute. 

🌬 To add to the atmosphere, play some calm background music and put this diagram on the board for the class to follow. 

🌬Breathing deeply slows down your heart rate and blood pressure, alleviates anxiety and stimulates brain growth!

BODY SCAN: Audio Recording

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week across the U.K.! Mental health has become much more of a concern over the last few years as children are put under so much pressure with tests and social media.

1 in 10 children in the U.K. have a mental health problem – that is 3 children in EVERY CLASS. Over the last 25 years, depression and anxiety in young people has risen by 70%.

Mindfulness is so beneficial for everybody’s mental health and helps to improve well being, focus, optimism, happiness and empathy.

Play this mindfulness exercise to your class every day this week to show them how I’m just 2 minutes they can calm down, relax and clear their minds. If you teach Year 6, then this body scan is great to calm them down before they sit their SATs. Good luck! 🙂

When we worry and stress, the amygdala part of our brains 🧠 sends too much adrenaline and cortisol around our bodies which makes the heart ❣ beat faster and pushes our blood and heart rates up and in short, stops the hippocampus part of the brain recalling facts and information from memory, which is why our minds can go blank in exams.

Try this ‘body scan’ with your class. It is a mindfulness technique to calm the brain and slow down these stress responses to give the class the best chance of doing well this week.

#MentalHealthAwarenessWeek

Help to spread mindfulness to the next generation to give them the skills to thrive in today’s society.

Holly Morris

The Mindfulness Teacher Ltd

Attachment – Mindful May Week 2 Record Sheet

‘The Perfect Place’

This week’s mindfulness activity is called a visualisation. We will relax our bodies and minds by imagining we are somewhere peaceful. This can be anywhere, it is our ‘perfect place’.

Below is the script for the teacher or teaching assistant to read out to the class. It is only 2 minutes long and should be repeated everyday for the class to get used to it and to start incorporating mindfulness into your class routine. It is also on the print-out attached at the top of the blog.

This activity is great to do after playtime to calm the children down and clear their minds after any disagreements (as I’m sure we’re all familiar with the 10 minutes of tales after lunch!). The children will then be quiet and calm, ready for their afternoon’s lessons.

Script:

Everybody sit comfortably and either look softly at the ground or close your eyes. Stay still and let your mind wander with this visualisation. I want you to imagine that you are stood in the middle of an empty field. The sun is shining down on you and you can feel it warming up your face. You can hear the birds tweeting in the nearby trees and you can feel the soft grass under your shoes as you start to walk across the meadow. You get to a gentle stream at the edge of the field and there’s a cute wooden bridge built over it. You step up onto the bridge and you hear it creak but all is safe. As your slowly walking across, you realise that at the other side is your perfect place. This is somewhere that makes you feel happy. This can be anywhere you wish. It might be somewhere that you’ve visited before or a place in your imagination. It may be a beach, a woodland, your bedroom… it may be somewhere that you have visualised before or somewhere new…it can be anywhere you wish. (Pause for 10 seconds to let them think). You step off the bridge and step into your happy place. You see a comfy spot to sit down at and a deep sense of relaxation washes over you. You feel every muscle in your body relax. It feels as if they were all tense and solid and are now melting in the sun. The muscles in your forehead and jaw soften, your shoulders loosen, your hands unclench and your legs feel free. Just spend a few more seconds sitting in your perfect place. Look around at everything that’s yours. This place is for you and nobody else. You can visit this place at any time you wish. It allows you to feel peaceful, calm and relaxed. You slowly get up from your perfect place and walk back to the bridge and as you hear the bridge creak under your feet, slowly open your eyes to come back to the classroom.

Record where your class visualised on the record sheet (attached at the top of the page).

If they don’t wish to share their happy place, then please respect their wishes.

Have fun and let me know how your class respond to the visualisation by commenting on this blog or on my Facebook page (The Mindfulness Teacher)!

Holly Morris
The Mindfulness Teacher Ltd

Mindful May Week 1 Record Sheet

#MindfulMay is a chance for teachers to introduce Mindfulness to their classes. You don’t need to know what mindfulness is (see previous blog post for a quick explanation) or to have practised it yourself, these will be super-quick, 2 minute activities to do throughout May to improve your class’s wellbeing.

Week 1 Challenge: VIBRANT VISUALS.

This exercise is focusing on one of the 5 senses: sight. It will calm down the class, encourage their brains to forget any worries they may have and focus their attention. It will teach them to be observant and it might shock them to realise how little detail they visually take in (If we took in all the detail every time we looked around, this would be information overload). This skill is used by artists when drawing. 

Every day this week (w/c 30.4.18), or for a couple of days – whatever you can cram into your timetable…ask the class to sit in silence and look around the room you are in.

Ask them to really look carefully… is there an item that they haven’t noticed before? (Maybe something on the ceiling or a pattern in the carpet) Or detail on an object they haven’t seen. Are the colours stronger that they hadn’t noticed or can they see different shades of a colour?

Try looking at an everyday item such as a pencil. Did they notice how many chips were in the paintwork? How many faces are on it? How you can see different shades of brown in the wood?

Ask some of these rhetorical questions to the class as they are looking in silence.
When the minute is up, have another minute for children to talk to a partner or share with the class what they noticed. Choose one child (or scribe for the class) to summarise their findings on the class record sheet (see attachment at the top of post).

How do they feel after the minute’s silence? Calm? Focused? Energised? How often do they ‘hear’ silence in a day?

Tomorrow, try doing this in the ICT suite, the hall, on the playground 1 minute before playtime… comment with where you did this with your class and what they noticed!

Have fun!

Holly Morris
The Mindfulness Teacher