Warning: The following is an awesome and useful self-regulation activity for the classroom!!
Here at Educalme, we help K-12 classroom teachers and their students thrive in a well-managed, calm and focused learning environment.
Our goal is to bring you social-emotional learning activities from which both you and your students will benefit. No lesson prep, no professional development required.
Today, we’re sharing with you one of these activities, a mindfulness exercise!
A student favourite over and over again is an activity called Your Calm Place.
It’s simple, yet highly effective to get your students to that amazing place where teaching and learning becomes fun, calm and easy!
Ask your students to close their eyes. Ask them to imagine their calm place. It can be anywhere at all, in or out of their home, wherever they might feel calm and at peace.
Get them to imagine their calm place in great detail:
Tell them to imagine what their calm place looks like.
…sounds like.
…smells like.
…feels like.
Then, tell them to imagine what their calm place tastes like.
Ask them any other question in relation to their calm place that you think of as well. With younger students, it can be helpful to give examples (ex: In your calm place, are you indoors or outdoors? Etc.). You can also share what your own calm place looks like as an example. Another great thing to do is to get students to check in with themselves to see what emotions they feel when they think about their calm place. There’s no magic recipe here, the idea is simply to really get them into that calm place. Make them feel like they’re actually there.
Now, remind your students that they have the power to think of this place anytime! They can imagine it with their 5 senses anytime they need to find calm and focus.
This awesome mindfulness exercise isn’t only for kids, it’s for you too! You have so much on your plate and deserve a moment to relax and settle into your calm place too!
So close your eyes, and imagine your calm place with your students. Enjoy!
The more you practice this self-regulation strategy explicitly, the more students will use this strategy on their own to find calm and focus throughout the school day.
We recommend practicing it every day for at least one week. However, we encourage you to practice it much longer than that so that students truly internalize this mindfulness activity!
Use this visualization activity on repeat in the classroom whenever you start to see the energy rising in the classroom! Furthermore, it’s an easy strategy to implement quickly and efficiently in between lessons or even in the middle of a lesson!
In the Educalme membership Free Trial, there’s a Your Calm Place poster that you can put up in your classroom as a visual reminder or maybe in your calm corner if you have one!
Educalme is an evidence-based, online social-emotional learning program for K-12 classrooms that helps schools take a systematic approach to meeting their wellbeing and academic goals. It’s made by teachers (that’s us! Kailey and Josianne here!) that understand the reality of the classroom.
The Educalme Free Trial gives you unlimited access to the first unit of the CASEL aligned Educalme online program. It includes a super short step-by-step program implementation video and a month of no prep SEL for your K-12 classroom! Done-for-you lessons for a whole month!
Sign up for the Educalme Free Trial and get your free “Your Calm Place” poster (and so much more!)
Enjoy basking in your imaginary calm place and thriving in a calm and focused classroom atmosphere!
