September 9, 2025 • 24 mins
In this episode, Amy Edelstein shares a practical, developmentally appropriate guidance on teaching mindfulness to middle schoolers. She describes how to adjust practices to this age group, with a focus on structure, repetition, and emotional intelligence.
Paying attention to their emerging selfhood, a teacher can guide that emergence while recognizing that students are still very group oriented.
Short, tactile practices, playful competition, and thoughtful repeated transitions help students build mindfulness habits that will last.
Tips and Guidelines in this session:
• modeling calm, order, and consistent routines
• keeping practices short and repeating for depth
• focusing on emotional intelligence over abstract discussions around the thought process
• focusing on emotional intelligence through role play
And other activities will help you design a session and a set of classroom activities that will build your students' self knowledge, resilience, and happiness.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:09):
Welcome to the Conscious Classroom Podcast,
where we're exploring tools andperspectives that support
educators and anyone who workswith teams to create more
conscious, supportive, andenriching learning environments.
I'm your host, Amy Edelstein,and I'll be sharing
transformative insights andeasy-to-implement classroom
supports that are all drawn frommindful awareness and systems
(00:32):
thinking.
The themes we'll discuss aredesigned to improve your own joy
and fulfillment in your work andincrease your impact on the
world we share.
Let's get on with this nextepisode.
Hello and welcome to theconscious classroom.
My name is Amy Edelstein.
Today I want to do somethingthat we haven't done for a
(00:53):
while.
I want to talk more practicallyabout how to work in the
classroom and specifically howto work with middle school
students, how to scale in adevelopmentally appropriate way,
how to work with them, how tomeet their interest and
curiosity at the same time ascontinuing to give them practice
(01:16):
with the mindfulness tools.
Students in middle school years,sixth, seventh, and eighth, but
particularly seventh and eighth,are still developing their sense
of self.
They're just beginning toindividuate and still very much
working in a group context.
(01:41):
They are still forming basicsocial skills, forming basic
habits.
And they're not yet independentin their own thinking and their
own ability to discern.
They take their cues very muchfrom the adults around them,
even more so than from theirpeers.
(02:04):
How we model as teachers ofmindfulness for middle schoolers
is very important.
How we model calm, order,ritual, consistency, stability,
guardrails, all those things arevery important for middle school
students.
They thrive when there's a senseof framework and structure.
(02:28):
It doesn't mean that they can'tgo out and go wild on recess or
play games and get lost in theexcitement.
But the general environmentneeds to be one of order and
consistency and repetition.
It's also difficult for them toobjectify the experience of
(02:49):
thought.
So mindfulness needs to be moretactile.
It'll be difficult for them totalk about thoughts as separate
from themselves.
In the middle school years, it'shelpful to focus a lot on
emotional intelligence, learningto understand emotion, identify
(03:11):
different emotions, articulatetheir emotions, and work on
their communication skills withone another and oneself.
What I've found in working withmiddle school is that they're
interestingly without filters.
(03:33):
They will share very freelyabout themselves, their
experience, and sometimesthey'll share things that may be
inappropriate in a classroomcontext, maybe too
self-disclosing, but they don'tseem to be aware of that.
So your questions, you want tobe thoughtful about how you
(03:55):
phrase them, so that you'rehelping them learn and you're
responding to their experience.
And you're also recognizing thatthey don't have a ton of
filters.
So some questions they may leadthem to be too self-disclosing
in a large group.
(04:18):
The middle-age years, theyrespond well to healthy
competition and games with bigrewards like stickers.
They just enjoy the fun ofpushing their edges.
And it lifts their energy andtheir excitement.
(04:41):
At the same time, practice isreally important.
They're already doing a lot ofactivity in their other school
subjects.
So practice is important, andyet we find that middle school
students really you don't wantto do longer than three or five
(05:04):
minutes of a mindfulnesspractice with them unless it's
mindful movement or body scan.
So, how do you do that?
The best way to do that is, forexample, if you're leading a
mindful breathing practice,spend a long time on the
posture, getting them into theirright posture, taking time over
(05:27):
it, and then guiding themthrough a mindful breath
practice for several minutes,three to five minutes.
And then when you finish thepractice, allow them to sit and
invite them to just notice theirexperience.
Without engaging them indiscussion, it'll be a little
(05:50):
bit hard for them to articulatewhat they feel right away.
Just let them observe theirexperience and then guide them
into a second repetition of thepractice.
So doing the same practice ofthe mindful breathing, staying
with the waves of the breath asthey roll in and the waves of
(06:13):
the breath as they roll out.
And again, letting them sit forfour or five minutes.
Keep your eyes open and keepalert.
Notice if some students aregetting antsy and start to
exhibit, you know, somefidgetiness that indicates that
(06:35):
you should bring the practice toa close.
The repetition is going to bemore important than the length.
And again, invite them to noticetheir experience.
Maybe notice if their body feelsmore settled or more tired or
more calm.
Notice if their emotions feellike they settled, like the snow
(06:56):
in a snow globe.
After they've had a moment toregulate and normalize and move
around, bring them back againinto a third form of mindful
breathing practice.
And this time you can change itup a little bit.
(07:16):
You can do breathing hands, youcan do star breath, tracing the
fingers, you can trace circleson the desk or on the back of
the hand.
So again, they're doing one morepractice.
It's the breathing that they'vealready done, but it's slightly
different, so it keeps theirattention.
And then when you release thepractice, invite them to just
(07:41):
write a few things in theirmindfulness journal, maybe a
limerick or a haiku about thepractice, what it was like.
Inviting them to do, to expresstheir emotions in a form that
they already use in languagearts can be helpful to help them
(08:02):
find words or ways to thinkabout their experience.
An open-ended, how did you feel?
What did you notice for that agegroup may be a little bit
difficult.
When you're talking with themiddle school students, that
(08:24):
grade band from sort of 12 to14, the way you want to describe
the mindfulness is in ways thatthey can understand.
So objectivity on thought oreven space from thought will
probably be a reach for themdevelopmentally.
You can talk to them aboutmindfulness as a way to enhance
(08:48):
their creativity and exercisetheir imagination by seeing
things in a new way, shiftinghow they see and how they pay
attention.
Through being still and seeingtheir emotions, they'll also be
able to develop their friendshipskills, which are very important
(09:09):
to them.
They're learning how to bebetter friends instead of taking
for granted, as they did ingrade school, that you're just
friends with everyone, andeveryone gets a Valentine,
everyone gets invited to thebirthday party.
Middle school, they're startingto form groups, and they worry
about their friendship skills.
(09:32):
And you can also talk with themabout how the mindfulness and
these tools that we'repracticing can help calm them
when they feel upset, whenthey're angry or sad or anxious
or overwhelmed.
One of the ways to communicatethese tools and make them a
(09:56):
habit for them is to invite themto remember what kinds of habits
of hygiene they learned whenthey were little.
Washing their hands, brushingtheir teeth, combing their hair,
taking a shower, cleaning theirrooms.
(10:18):
All the things that they learnedabout being clean and healthy,
good hygiene keeps them fromgetting sick.
So good hygiene for the mind ispart of what mindfulness
practice helps them enact.
(10:38):
So their mindfulness practice isa hygiene of the mind and the
emotions habit, and they want tostart practicing it.
So if they only wash their handsonce a week, they're not going
to get all the germs off.
So washing their hands every dayis several times a day is very
important, as we all learnedduring the pandemic.
(11:00):
People develop better habits ofcleanliness and hygiene.
So same with mindfulness.
Practicing on the bus for a fewminutes, practicing an advisory
or home room for a few minutes,practicing when you're lying in
bed as you fall asleep.
Making it a habit or a ritual ora training or a workout will
(11:26):
help you develop these mentaland emotional hygiene habits.
(11:46):
One of the exercises that I liketo do in the inner strength
program is to have them doemotional charades, where you
divide the class in half, youtell one half of the group a
specific emotion, whether it'sbeing happy or proud, being
(12:08):
lonely or wanting to be leftalone, being frustrated, angry,
or contented or peaceful.
Those all work very well.
And have that group walk downthe hall, expressing that
emotion, not in an exaggeratedway, but as if they were feeling
that emotion on a regular dayand walking down the hall.
(12:31):
How would they look?
And then the other half of theclass has to observe and guess
what emotion are theyexpressing?
What were the physical cues?
How did they hold their handsand their head and their eyes
and their shoulders?
Is that how each one wouldcommunicate that emotion, or
(12:51):
would you walk down the halldifferent?
How can you tell the differencefrom being lonely, wanting to
connect, and being wanting to beleft alone?
That's interestingly adistinction that the middle
school students are very goodat.
And they're often very kind.
They say, Oh, when I see aperson who wants to be left
(13:12):
alone, sometimes I just walknext to the hall, next to them
in the hall.
So I just walk down the hallwith them.
So I'm not invading their space,but I'm with them.
They can be very kind andobservant that way.
Then you want to relate this tothe mindfulness itself.
(13:35):
So we notice these thingssometimes, but we don't really
pay attention to what we'renoticing.
We take in these cues, and whenwe're really practicing mindful
observation, we're lookingwithout judgment.
So we're watching those studentswalking down the hall expressing
(13:57):
a certain emotion.
And we're not judging whether wethink they do it well or they
don't do it well, or we likethem or we don't like it.
We're really in an open waypicking up all the cues that we
can.
Being, you know, closelyobservant, you know, as if you
(14:19):
were a nature observer watchinganimals in the forest or Jane
Goodall studying herchimpanzees.
She just sat and watched andlearned, without expectation of
what she was going to find.
And when we observe mindfullyour surroundings, we're able
(14:42):
then to react and interactbetter and more kindly, more
accurately.
So if you're practicing thatmindful observation, you can
really see the differencebetween the student that's
lonely or wanting to be leftalone.
(15:03):
Or you can see the differencebetween the student that's just
happy and the student who'sproud.
And the student who's proud, youcan say, you can find out what
happened, what did youaccomplish, what gave you this
feeling, what did you achieve,and really connect with them
(15:23):
over what big milestone theymight have just celebrated.
Which is a little different whena student's having their
birthday and they're just happybecause it's their birthday and
they're going to celebrate.
So you start engaging thestudents in that sense that
(15:46):
being calm and settled inourselves enables us to have
more bandwidth for the worldaround us.
And the good way to see themiddle school years is they're
emerging.
They're like uh caterpillarswho've uh gone into the cocoon,
(16:08):
and they're about to emerge asthese butterflies.
They're going through atransformation and they're
peeking out and they'rebeginning to come out in their
new selves, their new bodies,their new emotional life, their
new individuation.
So we don't want to pull themout before their time.
(16:32):
But we want to keep helping themto emerge.
The practice itself with themindfulness is similar to high
school students.
In a way, there's not that muchyou need to adjust.
(16:53):
The practice is a base, youknow, they're all basic
practices with basic cues.
You simply want to adjust yourexpectations.
And so let's do a short mindfulbreathing practice, as we would
with our middle school students.
(17:15):
So come into your bestmindfulness posture.
Scoot forward in your chair soyou can feel the ground
underneath your feet.
Press your toes into your shoesand feel the solidity of the
floor.
Press your heels into your shoesand feel the stretch in your
(17:39):
calves.
Feel how you're glued to yourchair.
Gravity is pulling you down.
And how your back rises up tall.
And your head balances on top ofyour neck.
(18:00):
You can adjust your head alittle bit so it feels like it's
almost floating, and you feelvery tall, very straight.
You can imagine a string goingfrom the top of your head to a
star straight above us.
(18:20):
Simply holding you up so yourposture is easy and tall.
Notice where you're resting yourhands.
Maybe they're on your lap, maybethey're on your desk.
Notice what you're touching.
Is it cool and soft or hot andhard, smooth, or textured?
(18:52):
Now find a beautiful shape orcolor to rest your eyes on, or
you can rest your eyes on thedesk or the floor in front of
you.
Or you can close your eyes ifyou'd like.
Take one deep breath where youfeel like you're filling your
(19:14):
whole lungs.
When your lungs are completelyfull, your lungs go all the way
up to your collarbones, let allof the air out.
And in your own time, take twomore deep breaths, filling your
lungs all the way up and lettingout all of the air.
(19:37):
On your next breath, startpaying attention to the way that
the air goes in and the air goesout.
Let your breath be natural atyour own pace.
It might be slow and shallow, orit might be quick.
(19:58):
Whatever your natural rhythm is,is fine.
See if you can feel the airrolling in in your nose.
(20:58):
Every time you get distractedand start thinking about the
noise you heard in the hall, orsomething you're gonna do after
school, or lunchtime.
Put your attention back on yourbreath.
(21:26):
Letting all of this static calmdown.
Start stretching your fingersand stretching your toes,
(21:50):
putting your attention, movingit from the breath to the
familiar objects in the roomaround you and the people next
to you.
And we can bring the practice toa close.
You can always close thepractice with a chime.
(22:11):
I encourage you to allow thosecues of stretching the fingers,
shifting the attention so thatthey reorient into that shared
space and away from theirinternal exploration.
(22:31):
As adults, using a bell simplyto cue as we complete a practice
is not so startling.
But for younger students, theycan get a little disoriented,
and so inviting them slowly toreconnect with the movement in
their bodies, stretching, nolonger paying attention in the
(22:54):
same way, reorienting to thefamiliar objects in the room,
and then closing with a chime orwith a verbal cue will help them
feel at rest and connected.
(23:19):
So I hope this is helpful to allof you who work with children in
this age band.
I'd love to hear your thoughtsand comments and any tools that
you found useful, please sharethem with me.
And I encourage you to keeppracticing.
(23:41):
Keep your students practicing.
These are really basic,fundamental, foundational, and
helpful habits of mind that canlast a lifetime.
So enjoy and enjoy yourteaching, enjoy your practicing,
until next time.
(24:01):
Thank you for listening to theconscious classroom.
I'm your host, Amy Edelstein.
Please check out the show noteson InnerStrengthFoundation.net
for links and more information.
And if you enjoyed this podcast,please share it with a friend
and pass the love on.
See you next time.
Welcome to the Conscious Classroom Podcast,
where we're exploring tools andperspectives that support
educators and anyone who workswith teams to create more
conscious, supportive, andenriching learning environments.
I'm your host, Amy Edelstein,and I'll be sharing
transformative insights andeasy-to-implement classroom
supports that are all drawn frommindful awareness and systems
(00:32):
thinking.
The themes we'll discuss aredesigned to improve your own joy
and fulfillment in your work andincrease your impact on the
world we share.
Let's get on with this nextepisode.
Hello and welcome to theconscious classroom.
My name is Amy Edelstein.
Today I want to do somethingthat we haven't done for a
(00:53):
while.
I want to talk more practicallyabout how to work in the
classroom and specifically howto work with middle school
students, how to scale in adevelopmentally appropriate way,
how to work with them, how tomeet their interest and
curiosity at the same time ascontinuing to give them practice
(01:16):
with the mindfulness tools.
Students in middle school years,sixth, seventh, and eighth, but
particularly seventh and eighth,are still developing their sense
of self.
They're just beginning toindividuate and still very much
working in a group context.
(01:41):
They are still forming basicsocial skills, forming basic
habits.
And they're not yet independentin their own thinking and their
own ability to discern.
They take their cues very muchfrom the adults around them,
even more so than from theirpeers.
(02:04):
How we model as teachers ofmindfulness for middle schoolers
is very important.
How we model calm, order,ritual, consistency, stability,
guardrails, all those things arevery important for middle school
students.
They thrive when there's a senseof framework and structure.
(02:28):
It doesn't mean that they can'tgo out and go wild on recess or
play games and get lost in theexcitement.
But the general environmentneeds to be one of order and
consistency and repetition.
It's also difficult for them toobjectify the experience of
(02:49):
thought.
So mindfulness needs to be moretactile.
It'll be difficult for them totalk about thoughts as separate
from themselves.
In the middle school years, it'shelpful to focus a lot on
emotional intelligence, learningto understand emotion, identify
(03:11):
different emotions, articulatetheir emotions, and work on
their communication skills withone another and oneself.
What I've found in working withmiddle school is that they're
interestingly without filters.
(03:33):
They will share very freelyabout themselves, their
experience, and sometimesthey'll share things that may be
inappropriate in a classroomcontext, maybe too
self-disclosing, but they don'tseem to be aware of that.
So your questions, you want tobe thoughtful about how you
(03:55):
phrase them, so that you'rehelping them learn and you're
responding to their experience.
And you're also recognizing thatthey don't have a ton of
filters.
So some questions they may leadthem to be too self-disclosing
in a large group.
(04:18):
The middle-age years, theyrespond well to healthy
competition and games with bigrewards like stickers.
They just enjoy the fun ofpushing their edges.
And it lifts their energy andtheir excitement.
(04:41):
At the same time, practice isreally important.
They're already doing a lot ofactivity in their other school
subjects.
So practice is important, andyet we find that middle school
students really you don't wantto do longer than three or five
(05:04):
minutes of a mindfulnesspractice with them unless it's
mindful movement or body scan.
So, how do you do that?
The best way to do that is, forexample, if you're leading a
mindful breathing practice,spend a long time on the
posture, getting them into theirright posture, taking time over
(05:27):
it, and then guiding themthrough a mindful breath
practice for several minutes,three to five minutes.
And then when you finish thepractice, allow them to sit and
invite them to just notice theirexperience.
Without engaging them indiscussion, it'll be a little
(05:50):
bit hard for them to articulatewhat they feel right away.
Just let them observe theirexperience and then guide them
into a second repetition of thepractice.
So doing the same practice ofthe mindful breathing, staying
with the waves of the breath asthey roll in and the waves of
(06:13):
the breath as they roll out.
And again, letting them sit forfour or five minutes.
Keep your eyes open and keepalert.
Notice if some students aregetting antsy and start to
exhibit, you know, somefidgetiness that indicates that
(06:35):
you should bring the practice toa close.
The repetition is going to bemore important than the length.
And again, invite them to noticetheir experience.
Maybe notice if their body feelsmore settled or more tired or
more calm.
Notice if their emotions feellike they settled, like the snow
(06:56):
in a snow globe.
After they've had a moment toregulate and normalize and move
around, bring them back againinto a third form of mindful
breathing practice.
And this time you can change itup a little bit.
(07:16):
You can do breathing hands, youcan do star breath, tracing the
fingers, you can trace circleson the desk or on the back of
the hand.
So again, they're doing one morepractice.
It's the breathing that they'vealready done, but it's slightly
different, so it keeps theirattention.
And then when you release thepractice, invite them to just
(07:41):
write a few things in theirmindfulness journal, maybe a
limerick or a haiku about thepractice, what it was like.
Inviting them to do, to expresstheir emotions in a form that
they already use in languagearts can be helpful to help them
(08:02):
find words or ways to thinkabout their experience.
An open-ended, how did you feel?
What did you notice for that agegroup may be a little bit
difficult.
When you're talking with themiddle school students, that
(08:24):
grade band from sort of 12 to14, the way you want to describe
the mindfulness is in ways thatthey can understand.
So objectivity on thought oreven space from thought will
probably be a reach for themdevelopmentally.
You can talk to them aboutmindfulness as a way to enhance
(08:48):
their creativity and exercisetheir imagination by seeing
things in a new way, shiftinghow they see and how they pay
attention.
Through being still and seeingtheir emotions, they'll also be
able to develop their friendshipskills, which are very important
(09:09):
to them.
They're learning how to bebetter friends instead of taking
for granted, as they did ingrade school, that you're just
friends with everyone, andeveryone gets a Valentine,
everyone gets invited to thebirthday party.
Middle school, they're startingto form groups, and they worry
about their friendship skills.
(09:32):
And you can also talk with themabout how the mindfulness and
these tools that we'repracticing can help calm them
when they feel upset, whenthey're angry or sad or anxious
or overwhelmed.
One of the ways to communicatethese tools and make them a
(09:56):
habit for them is to invite themto remember what kinds of habits
of hygiene they learned whenthey were little.
Washing their hands, brushingtheir teeth, combing their hair,
taking a shower, cleaning theirrooms.
(10:18):
All the things that they learnedabout being clean and healthy,
good hygiene keeps them fromgetting sick.
So good hygiene for the mind ispart of what mindfulness
practice helps them enact.
(10:38):
So their mindfulness practice isa hygiene of the mind and the
emotions habit, and they want tostart practicing it.
So if they only wash their handsonce a week, they're not going
to get all the germs off.
So washing their hands every dayis several times a day is very
important, as we all learnedduring the pandemic.
(11:00):
People develop better habits ofcleanliness and hygiene.
So same with mindfulness.
Practicing on the bus for a fewminutes, practicing an advisory
or home room for a few minutes,practicing when you're lying in
bed as you fall asleep.
Making it a habit or a ritual ora training or a workout will
(11:26):
help you develop these mentaland emotional hygiene habits.
(11:46):
One of the exercises that I liketo do in the inner strength
program is to have them doemotional charades, where you
divide the class in half, youtell one half of the group a
specific emotion, whether it'sbeing happy or proud, being
(12:08):
lonely or wanting to be leftalone, being frustrated, angry,
or contented or peaceful.
Those all work very well.
And have that group walk downthe hall, expressing that
emotion, not in an exaggeratedway, but as if they were feeling
that emotion on a regular dayand walking down the hall.
(12:31):
How would they look?
And then the other half of theclass has to observe and guess
what emotion are theyexpressing?
What were the physical cues?
How did they hold their handsand their head and their eyes
and their shoulders?
Is that how each one wouldcommunicate that emotion, or
(12:51):
would you walk down the halldifferent?
How can you tell the differencefrom being lonely, wanting to
connect, and being wanting to beleft alone?
That's interestingly adistinction that the middle
school students are very goodat.
And they're often very kind.
They say, Oh, when I see aperson who wants to be left
(13:12):
alone, sometimes I just walknext to the hall, next to them
in the hall.
So I just walk down the hallwith them.
So I'm not invading their space,but I'm with them.
They can be very kind andobservant that way.
Then you want to relate this tothe mindfulness itself.
(13:35):
So we notice these thingssometimes, but we don't really
pay attention to what we'renoticing.
We take in these cues, and whenwe're really practicing mindful
observation, we're lookingwithout judgment.
So we're watching those studentswalking down the hall expressing
(13:57):
a certain emotion.
And we're not judging whether wethink they do it well or they
don't do it well, or we likethem or we don't like it.
We're really in an open waypicking up all the cues that we
can.
Being, you know, closelyobservant, you know, as if you
(14:19):
were a nature observer watchinganimals in the forest or Jane
Goodall studying herchimpanzees.
She just sat and watched andlearned, without expectation of
what she was going to find.
And when we observe mindfullyour surroundings, we're able
(14:42):
then to react and interactbetter and more kindly, more
accurately.
So if you're practicing thatmindful observation, you can
really see the differencebetween the student that's
lonely or wanting to be leftalone.
(15:03):
Or you can see the differencebetween the student that's just
happy and the student who'sproud.
And the student who's proud, youcan say, you can find out what
happened, what did youaccomplish, what gave you this
feeling, what did you achieve,and really connect with them
(15:23):
over what big milestone theymight have just celebrated.
Which is a little different whena student's having their
birthday and they're just happybecause it's their birthday and
they're going to celebrate.
So you start engaging thestudents in that sense that
(15:46):
being calm and settled inourselves enables us to have
more bandwidth for the worldaround us.
And the good way to see themiddle school years is they're
emerging.
They're like uh caterpillarswho've uh gone into the cocoon,
(16:08):
and they're about to emerge asthese butterflies.
They're going through atransformation and they're
peeking out and they'rebeginning to come out in their
new selves, their new bodies,their new emotional life, their
new individuation.
So we don't want to pull themout before their time.
(16:32):
But we want to keep helping themto emerge.
The practice itself with themindfulness is similar to high
school students.
In a way, there's not that muchyou need to adjust.
(16:53):
The practice is a base, youknow, they're all basic
practices with basic cues.
You simply want to adjust yourexpectations.
And so let's do a short mindfulbreathing practice, as we would
with our middle school students.
(17:15):
So come into your bestmindfulness posture.
Scoot forward in your chair soyou can feel the ground
underneath your feet.
Press your toes into your shoesand feel the solidity of the
floor.
Press your heels into your shoesand feel the stretch in your
(17:39):
calves.
Feel how you're glued to yourchair.
Gravity is pulling you down.
And how your back rises up tall.
And your head balances on top ofyour neck.
(18:00):
You can adjust your head alittle bit so it feels like it's
almost floating, and you feelvery tall, very straight.
You can imagine a string goingfrom the top of your head to a
star straight above us.
(18:20):
Simply holding you up so yourposture is easy and tall.
Notice where you're resting yourhands.
Maybe they're on your lap, maybethey're on your desk.
Notice what you're touching.
Is it cool and soft or hot andhard, smooth, or textured?
(18:52):
Now find a beautiful shape orcolor to rest your eyes on, or
you can rest your eyes on thedesk or the floor in front of
you.
Or you can close your eyes ifyou'd like.
Take one deep breath where youfeel like you're filling your
(19:14):
whole lungs.
When your lungs are completelyfull, your lungs go all the way
up to your collarbones, let allof the air out.
And in your own time, take twomore deep breaths, filling your
lungs all the way up and lettingout all of the air.
(19:37):
On your next breath, startpaying attention to the way that
the air goes in and the air goesout.
Let your breath be natural atyour own pace.
It might be slow and shallow, orit might be quick.
(19:58):
Whatever your natural rhythm is,is fine.
See if you can feel the airrolling in in your nose.
(20:58):
Every time you get distractedand start thinking about the
noise you heard in the hall, orsomething you're gonna do after
school, or lunchtime.
Put your attention back on yourbreath.
(21:26):
Letting all of this static calmdown.
Start stretching your fingersand stretching your toes,
(21:50):
putting your attention, movingit from the breath to the
familiar objects in the roomaround you and the people next
to you.
And we can bring the practice toa close.
You can always close thepractice with a chime.
(22:11):
I encourage you to allow thosecues of stretching the fingers,
shifting the attention so thatthey reorient into that shared
space and away from theirinternal exploration.
(22:31):
As adults, using a bell simplyto cue as we complete a practice
is not so startling.
But for younger students, theycan get a little disoriented,
and so inviting them slowly toreconnect with the movement in
their bodies, stretching, nolonger paying attention in the
(22:54):
same way, reorienting to thefamiliar objects in the room,
and then closing with a chime orwith a verbal cue will help them
feel at rest and connected.
(23:19):
So I hope this is helpful to allof you who work with children in
this age band.
I'd love to hear your thoughtsand comments and any tools that
you found useful, please sharethem with me.
And I encourage you to keeppracticing.
(23:41):
Keep your students practicing.
These are really basic,fundamental, foundational, and
helpful habits of mind that canlast a lifetime.
So enjoy and enjoy yourteaching, enjoy your practicing,
until next time.
(24:01):
Thank you for listening to theconscious classroom.
I'm your host, Amy Edelstein.
Please check out the show noteson InnerStrengthFoundation.net
for links and more information.
And if you enjoyed this podcast,please share it with a friend
and pass the love on.
See you next time.
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