This week’s Ed Tech Fitness challenge is about taking a few minutes for mindful breathing during the day. In announcing the challenge I mentioned a free app called Stop, Breathe & Think. The app provides a catalog of guided mindful breathing activities.
Stop, Breathe & Think Activities for Kids
There is a companion site to the Stop, Breathe & Think app that K-12 teachers can access for free. The companion site contains tips and activities for conducting mindful breathing activities with students. Those include check-in activities, color activities, and activities for building emotional vocabularies. The Stop, Breathe & Think educators page also provides classroom posters that you can download for free.
5 Helpful Tips from the founder of Stop, Breathe & Think
The founder of Stop, Breathe & Think is featured in the following video in which she provides five tips for conducting mindful breathing activities with kids. Her third tip is the one that resonated with me the most. Watch the video here or as embedded below.
Why conduct Stop, Breathe & Think activities?
I used one of the activities today after I got an especially irritating email. It didn’t make the email any less irritating, but it did help me regain my focus and get back to the task at hand which was replying to every email in my inbox. A Stop, Think & Breathe activity could have an equally beneficial effect for students who have trouble regaining focus after encountering frustrations or annoyances in their classrooms.
One last thought about Stop, Breathe & Think; the educators page does a nice thing in the footer in providing a PDF titled Self-care for Teachers. That one page PDF has a few simple activities that you can do in your classroom when you’re having a hard day and need to refocus. Get a copy of the PDF here.