Giving utmost priority to children’s social-emotional regulation[1] and academics is vital for their lifelong success. Hence, society must emphasize intentionality in teaching mindfulness to young learners to learn how to effectively manage and process their emotions and build healthy connections with other children. This is where mindfulness activities for students intervene.
Mindfulness is proven to increase productivity and self-awareness, which is needed for learners to be fully present and take bold steps in their studies. It allows them to be able to reach their full potential, which is very useful in the future as they take on the progressive chapters of their lives.
Ultimately, to improve students’ cognitive abilities, you have to look at the situation from a holistic point of view and incorporate activities that help them become mindful of themselves.
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How Can Mindfulness Help Students?
Teaching kids mindfulness will significantly train them to become proactive about themselves and gain self-awareness. Mindfulness meditations help kids to manage their anger and anxiety, improve their focus, practice gratitude, and cultivate kindness among their peers in school.
Incorporating mindfulness activities into school curricula would help build a peaceful school environment and produce well-rounded citizens of the country.
10 Mindfulness Activities For Students
The goal is to help learners of different ages practice mindfulness in their daily tasks in the academy. The activities for students can be tailored to the needs of the learners who will undergo daily mindfulness training.
Mindfulness Activities For Elementary Students:
Meditation and mindfulness activities at the elementary level need to meet their high energy, underdeveloped brain structure, and attention, and here are some of the fun mindfulness activities:
Stillness Challenge
The stillness challenge seems to be an antithesis to acquainting kids with mindfulness, but believe it or not, it is as effective as the other mindfulness activities. To begin, give the little ones candy. This is the essential part of the exercise, as it allows them to continue paying attention to the moment without their thoughts wandering off.
Have the children close their eyes and allow them to be aware and mindful of the candy in their mouths. Instruct the kids to note every feeling they feel while nibbling the candy. By doing this exercise with kids in school, you allow them to meditate and enhance their capacity to be still and stay focused.
Sound Challenge
The sound challenge is one of the mindfulness activities for students that don’t require much energy and is perfect for kids learning self-confidence and developing mindfulness.
To start, instruct the children to sit down and take a breath. Let them close their eyes and relax every part of their bodies. Using a tuning fork or a sounding bowl, make a sound and let the kids listen to the sound fade out. As the sound fades, tell the kids to bow their heads if they can no longer hear the sound.
These activities for students are perfect if you wish to teach mindfulness among kids with little to no ability to stay still.
Mindfulness Activities For Middle School Students
Children in middle school are highly susceptible to peer influences as it is a phase in their life where they transition and gain independence. Here are the following activities that will help them transition and become responsible children:
Mindful Cooking
As they begin their walk as independent individuals, mindful cooking is a great way to help them let go of any feeling that suggests they are limited. Give them the freedom to prepare and cook the food of their choice and demonstrate the things that seem hard for them.
In this exercise, you need to allow them to process everything they put in and recognize how the food changed throughout the process.
Mindful Dancing
This exercise helps students develop happiness and positivity in kids. More than just a typical dance, kids must focus on the song’s rhythm and feel all their muscles contract as their body develops a memory of the rhythm. Anyone can do this exercise in a school or home setting.
SMART Checklist
This practice helps students learn to become organized and motivated. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bounded.
Begin this mindfulness practice by allowing the children to decide on their own and create a list of their tasks. Throughout the day, instruct them to tick off what they have accomplished.
Mindfulness Activities For High School Students
The mental health of students in high school is equally as crucial as that of older and younger students’ mental health. As they are in a different age group, they require a different approach to help deal with the stress brought on by college applications and other academic and non-academic activities.
Here are some of the mindfulness activities for students in high school that are age-appropriate and fit well with their needs:
Safari Exercise
The safari exercise is one of many mindfulness games that are a fun, practical, and useful tool to help students feel peace and develop a grateful perspective on the things around them.
Start by helping your students to remain quiet and calm. You can ask them to take three deep breaths and incorporate them with the exercise of some breathing practices like square breathing. Instead of focusing on how their body feels in a body scan, the idea is to direct the students to focus on the things around them.
Facilitate the mindfulness activity by picking something that can be found in proximity and asking the students to examine that particular thing. Ask your students to observe the movements of natural things around them. The activities need to be engaging and require the exchange of thoughts between the moderator and the learners, which is one of them.
This exercise helps students relax, enhance focus on the tiniest detail, feel grateful, and gain awareness of their surroundings.
Music Appreciation
Practicing mindfulness through music appreciation is perfect for musically inclined students but caters to those with different tastes as well. Music appreciation is also perfect for helping learners cope with student stress and anxiety.
Like in any guided meditation, help children relax before hearing the sound or music. Breathing exercises also help kids focus and establish a calm state of mind. While playing the music, the students have relevant questions like how many instruments they can hear.
Tech Break With Breathing Exercise
High school students often spend most of their time in front of computers or sliding through their mobile smartphones. During a tech break, you encourage the students to take a few deep breaths and teach them to appreciate the world off of their screens.
Older children in this age group are constantly exposed to technologies that often cause learning disabilities and disruption of their senses. Furthermore, these are sometimes linked to depression and other mental illnesses.
In such activities like this, you teach the student to learn a new skill by replacing the hours of tech exposure with things that are productive for personal development. Do this activity for around thirty minutes a day and incorporate it with other exercises that require their five senses to work, just like a mindful walk in nature.
Mindfulness Activities For College Students
Aside from the difficulty of the lessons, college students face different emotions and stressors during life in the university. Thus, they require specific mindfulness activities that meet their needs, and here are just some of the few:
Mindful Candle Study
First, you need to provide candles for your students or ask them to bring a candle of their choice for this mindfulness practice. With lights dimmed and window curtains closed, encourage students to take a deep breath as they sit calmly and light their candles. Instruct them to relax their mind and body as they mindfully observe the way the candlelight flickers and sways from side to side.
While observing the candlelight, instruct them to take slow, deep breaths as they allow their mind to slowly wander off. Do this mindfulness meditation practice for around five to ten minutes before starting your lecture to set your students’ focus.
Mindful candle study incorporated with a mindful-breathing technique is one of many mindfulness activities for students at the collegiate level that help in calming and relaxing students who are constantly challenged with deadlines and other mental and physical activities.
It also allows the older students to be in the present, have a sensory experience, gain self-awareness, and develop self-esteem that is highly needed to succeed in their chosen path.
Mindful Intention Setting
Intention setting is considered one of the various quick mindfulness activities for students that require less effort. Start by allowing your students to be in a comfortable position. Allow them to breathe and help them feel the stillness and relaxation as they calm their emotions.
Ask them to write down all their intentions for the lecture on a piece of paper. To help them engage their minds, instruct them to write ways for them to achieve the intentions written on the paper. Beginning your lectures with this exercise will help every student have a positive attitude and motivation, become less stressed, and feel driven to learn new things in your class.
Conclusion
It has been confirmed through extensive scientific research that teaching mindfulness practices to young students help them improve their mental health and positively impacts their attention span, self-control, social competence, and self-regulation.
Such activities are also proven to improve young minds in various facets of their well-being, such as cognitive, social, and psychological. Ultimately, these activities for students may vary in complexity and difficulty, but all of these have the same objective of helping the children learn to be in the present moment, achieve mindful focus, and manage stress levels brought on by external factors.
