Leading Children To Mindfulness

In this lesson, you will reaffirm what you already know about mindfulness. Since this course is designed to help you teach mindfulness to children, the underlying assumption is that you have, or are working on, a regular mindfulness practice yourself. If you don’t currently practice mindfulness but are interested in developing your own practice, I would encourage you to do this before trying to teach it to children. (Consider a non-mathematician teaching math to high school students, or a non-French speaker teaching French from internet videos – you get the idea.) Categorically, if we aren’t involved in practicing mindfulness, we can’t teach it to our children. You’ve almost certainly heard this airline message preflight: If oxygen masks fall, please attach your own before attempting to help anyone else. The analogy applies as well to mindfulness. To be in a position to help someone to become aware, you must first become aware yourself.

Using the senses is an intuitive way to lead children to mindfulness. We can use our senses to make a direct route back to mindfulness. This is one of the easiest ways of checking in throughout the day for a sense of your own awareness, but also for using concrete examples with children later on. We use sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste to anchor us in the present moment.

Visualisation is a technique combining imagination and feelings. This practice is especially useful in children, who crave concrete examples of what they learn. Building a clear picture in the mind of your audience helps concertise their experience.

Today, we look at creativity and the difference between the logical "adult" mind and the open, curious mind of a child. We'll also be doing a mindful eating exercise. Remember that you'll need something to eat with you for today, something you can hold in your hand, like a piece of fruit or a biscuit.

Today, we will explore practicing and then, leading mindfulness with our eyes open. If you are working with a group of children, particularly younger children, having your own eyes closed may well be counterproductive to their calm and general cooperativeness.

We will be exploring creating a mindfulness session today, as we work on your script. We will also be doing some breath and colour exercises to give you some ideas for your own sessions. We'll also be thinking about the different stages of creating a meditation. What is an intention versus a goal? How do we stay grounded? How do we use the senses? How self-aware are you of your own body and emotions?

Today, we will be taking your meditation scripts and identifying key points which can then act as prompts in delivering a more natural, flowing practice than can be achieved by reading a script word for word.

We will look at what we mean by being grounded, how this helps settle us in order to present a meditation, and how to use this in your own mindfulness practice. We will do an exercise using a tree as a metaphor for our groundedness.

"Working with children" is a broad area. Children develop differently and there are key age ranges that require different approaches. We will be looking at different strategies, the use of different vocabulary, and different topics for different age groups.

This includes reflection on a poem by Kahlil Gibran. Why are we working with children? What are your own intentions, desires, and hopes? We will also look at creating an environment for meditation using some simple but effective and practical tips. We will finish with some research on the effectiveness of mindfulness.