Mindfulness activities is definitely one of my obsessions this year! I knew mindfulness practices were gonna be so useful for our classes and we were already doing some little breathing practices BUT this year we took it on another level and we have included books, videos and some yoga – meditation practices in our curriculum.
This is my first Mindfulness Lesson Plan for your English lessons.
If you haven’t checked my introductory post Mindfulness in the Classroom, A Guide for English Language Teachers here is the link!
I’ve been doing these mindfulness activities both in my face to face classes and online kindergarten classes and in my online 1st grade class. It means, everything we do can be done easily in virtual lessons. If you share the videos with your kids and make sure that they can see you simultaneously, you can easily manage mindfulness activities in your virtual classes, too.
Lately, in our Bitmoji Kindergarten Classroom blog post where I shared all our 7 classrooms; I’ve mentioned some of these activities and also I’ve shared our mindfulness classroom so that everyone can reach them whenever they need to.
September Mindfulness Activities Lesson Plan
If you visit our mindfulness classroom and click on the objects on the shelves, you will reach some breathing practices. One of them is called “Square Breathing” and it is definitely my favorite one right now! If you watch the video you will see what I mean 😀 It is perfect for young learners as it visualizes the whole “4 sec inhale, 4 sec hold, 4 sec exhale, 4 sec hold” practice by using a balloon fish! <3 Perfect!
Story: Bee Calm
If you look at our mindfulness classroom, you will see a book called “Bee Calm” on the bookshelf. It is a lovely book and a perfect starter for any mindfulness lessons with young and very young students. Because it is all about animals! So, you are not just revising and teaching animals vocabulary, you are also making kids move and do yoga poses! By the way, all those yoga poses cover also very useful words like “airplane, chair, dog, tree and mountain!”
After watching this video couple of times, I just stopped before the important dialogues and asked kids questions and then, we simply copied the yoga poses that the animals were showing to the bee.
Then I realized that I didn’t wanna open the video every time I wanna do the actions… So, I decided to create puppets! 😀
Yes, I used that YouTube video to get the screenshots of the story characters and with a little Photoshop I created transparent – png format images. Printed them out, cut them all and attached them on craft sticks!
I also added the pictures of the yoga poses to show my kids what do they mean. I’m sharing the pictures that I used to make these lovely story visuals. Hope you find them useful ^_^
That’s it for now ^_^ I already prepared next month’s mindfulness activities! I’m so excited to share them with my kids and of course with you 😀
If you still have doubts about taking mindfulness practices into your classroom, just take this story and imagine you are reading an ordinary story to your kids 😀 You will see that it will not just give you a chance to have kids move a little bit around, you will also be practicing a good amount of English.
So,
Bee Calm and Breathe <3
