Using Your Senses to be Mindful

The lessons in this unit help kids understand and practice mindfulness. Mindfulness is to purposefully pay attention to your breathing, feelings, senses, or actions in the present moment. When a child is mindful, they increase their ability to regulate emotions, manage stress, and self-motivate. You can vary the ways your students practice being mindful each day. Some of the many fit resources available for daily mindfulness practice include:

• Mindful Moments Cards
• My Keep Cool Cards
• fitFlow Yoga
• 5 Senses in 5 Minutes Grounding Exercise for Kids Video
• Animal Breathing Techniques Video
• Positive Self-Talk Coloring Pages
• Relax With Dakota: A Mindful Meditation for Kids-Video

Describe an item in your classroom using your five senses. Can the students guess what you are talking about?

Share the video 5 Senses in 5 Minutes A Grounding Exercise for Kids to get kids thinking about how they can uses their five senses to be mindful.

To use this with your students click here.

Five Senses and Feelings

Present the slideshow to guide students through a mindful activity using their senses. Allow ample time between slides to encourage mindful thoughts.

Identify Mindful Actions

Tell students that whenever they pause and pay attention to something on purpose, they are being mindful. When they looked carefully at the picture, they were being mindful.  Discuss how they used their senses to be mindful when they observed the forest picture.

Check for Understanding: How can you use your senses to be mindful? (Pause and think about how something looks, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels.)

Use Your Senses

Imagine you are in the forest pictured on the coloring page. Think about what you would see, smell, taste, touch, and hear as you color the picture. How do you feel?

Today we took a moment to be mindful and looked carefully at a picture. When can you pause to be mindful and use your senses later today?