8 The Best Mindfulness Activities For Kids

Would you like your child to learn how to be more mindful, calm and relaxed? Here I am sharing with you all the best mindfulness activities for kids that I have tested.

What is mindfulness and how can impact a child

Mindfulness is the practice where you use all your senses to be fully present in your life at this specific moment. Doing daily activities with full awareness will help to be fully involved and gain positive energy and attention. Even the most basic activities can and should be done with a sense of mindfulness; eating dinner.

Do you want your child to try something for the first time? Help him/her to pay attention to the texture and taste – ask questions. You can catch his attention by explaining how food will help him grow big and strong and how our bodies require all the vitamins and nutrients and aliment can give us for developing a healthy body.

I remember my mom used to do this with me… Every time she was feeding me spinach, she was making sure to remind me of how strong Popeye the Sailor Man was after consuming cans of spinach.

Another great advantage is that by practising mindfulness the children can become incredibly empowered. It can help them to control better stress and anxiety when it does occur. It helps with self-regulation and promotes positive emotions and self-compassion.

How Mindfulness helps a mindset in full growth

Even if children don’t have to deal with the daily stress of adult life, sometimes they get anxious and scared just like the rest of us. In this situation, parents tend to become overwhelmed and keep wondering what’s to be done to keep their kids calm.

Practising mindfulness techniques can help children change their behaviour and acceptance, changing their fixed mindset to an f growth one.  

Mindfulness can give the impression children are in charge and empowered, so they will gain trust and want to do more, discover more and take risks.

Mindfulness techniques like deep breathing and stretching the body can help children overcome anxiety when they make mistakes and are purely scared.

By promoting self-love and self-compassion through mindfulness activities can help children overcome self-judgment.

Learning mindfulness early in life will help kids grow up to be healthy adults with strong control over stress.

Definitely will be difficult to make an anxious child sit calm and meditate for half an hour, however, there are lots of other activities you can try with him and I will help you through this article to discover several.

Mindfulness activities for kids

This will be fun for both you and the children. It’s a new way of spending quality time together.I have prepared for you 8 mindful activities to try together with your kid that will make him more anchored in the present and understand better how to use all his senses and understand and appreciate his daily sensations.

1.  Focus on the 5 senses

Show your kids how to be present in the moment by using their senses. This classic mindfulness exercise will catch their attention and will make them forget their worries and will make them engage with the environment that is surrounding them. By focusing on every single sense, they can slow down any anxious thoughts.

Ask your kids to look around and ask themselves the following:

What can they see?

What can they hear?

What can they smell?

What can they feel?

What can they taste?

Make sure you make them discover new things. Senses they never smelled, food that has never been tasted before, noises new to them, objects that may have never been seen and sensations that never experienced before. Everything new will be analyzed in more detail. Interact with them and ask questions about what they feel, and how soft or hard is a specific surface. Ask them to describe the taste and if are noises that sound familiar to them. Kids have a great rich imagination. You will be amazed by the power of their brain and how many new things they can discover in a simple game. Bonus, their knowledge will increase.

2. Colourful drawing

Every single kid is becoming super happy when hears about drawing. It is one of the most fun mindfulness activities for them.

Do a small exercise with them: ask them to close their eyes and think of something that brings happiness to them. Once they confirm they have it, challenge them to draw it on a piece of paper with colourful crayons. Then rule them through the process, and start asking questions that will stimulate their senses. How drawing the lines with a specific crayon feels like, ask them to describe the texture of the paper, what about the size and shape of it? Ask them to explain why they chose to use specific colours in their picture and to describe the colour of the final object they are drawing. Make them pay attention to the colours that are picking. This will intensely calm their anxious racing thoughts by having their full attention towards the act of drawing. 

During this activity, you’ll probably notice that they might become distracted and talk about random things as they practice. When this happens, your role is to gently bring them back to the main activity by asking them to describe what they’re doing. In this way, you make them aware without them realizing, of the fact that they have a purpose that needs to be accomplished at that moment without speaking about distractions. 

3. Soap bubbles playing 

Everybody loves bubbles. This is a great breathing exercise without making them realize by inhaling in slowly and then exhaling in relaxation into a bubble tube.  In that specific moment, point out the power of a bubble, how can be equal to an anxious thought and how is floating outside the kid’s mind while you together observe the bubble disappear into the air, popping with the worry that the child may have. Make sure you encourage him, by mentioning how light should be feeling now that part of the burden is gone, you rule him towards a calm mind.

Don’t forget to mention clearly, child worries are gone now exactly like the bubble.

In the end, you can take the opportunity to point out the strong characteristics of this activity and how in the future he can use the breathing technique to calm himself down quickly in stressful situations. After such a fun exercise, I am sure his mind will always remember how amazing is mindful breathing and what power it has.

Blowing bubbles may be also categorized as a mindful activity. It gets kids out of their heads and focuses on blowing bubbles. Want to challenge them and get them to focus more? Ask them to identify and blow the biggest bubble they can! Watch as they light up and enjoy attempt after attempt.

4. Play in nature

The power of nature has the same intensity in kids as has in adults so here is another mindfulness activity that will help your kid connect and control his focus through calm and relaxing thoughts.

Physical activity is a great arm to absorb the good vibes into your body. I would recommend you do this one after your child had a specific task that required all his attention and may have caused mental stress. Let’s say right after a day of school on which he had a math test. I do remember me being terrified and exhausted after a similar one when I was a child. It will give him a mental break after an intensive day and this is exactly what you want to do.

You can go outside and transform your normal walk into an exciting adventure. As you walk together put all of your senses to work and start analyzing the environment. Notice how the trees are showing themselves according to the season, the smell of freshly cut grass, the feel of the air on your skin, and pay attention to all of the little movements and sensations while touching a rock or a wildflower as you walk. Do you see any birds? Point that out to your kid. Make him count them and mention the colour of each. Make sure you don’t do a lot of noise or speak too much. Otherwise, you may not be able to observe all those little details. Walking in nature is a wonderful stress-relieving activity that helps clear the mind and sparks creative ideas. The same effect is having on your kid also.

5. Practice friends breathing

You and your child are already best buddies, I bet. Why not be breathing baddies? Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Because mindful breathing might be difficult for kids to understand and focus, gather some help from the favourite toy of your kid. Let’s say he has a truly loved teddy bear. Bring that with you and pretend you do a group session. Make your kid feel helpful by teaching the bear how to do it, so lie him down and instruct him to breathe in through his nose.

Once this is done and he understands how to do it, ask him to place the bear on his tummy, place his hands over it and start breathing again while noticing how the toy is moving due to the air that’s inflating his belly. You do the count for him so in this way will be coordinated and focus on his body and his feelings. Ask him his he’s feeling doing this breathing exercise with his best buddy and if he would continue teaching the bear to relax. It is proven that mindful breathing boosts brain function and energy levels. It also relaxes the mind and body, so teaching this exercise allows anxious kids to calm themselves down quickly.

6. Analyze each other heartbeat

Playing the doctor should be fascinating for a child. Analyzing his patient, especially the heartbeat and understanding how the body releases sensations that he never paid attention to before, definitely will catch him.  Can be categorized as a wonderful activity to do if your child is feeling stressed or anxious.

Kids are like adults, experiencing similar sensations, frustration and angriness when something they are working on is putting more pressure than expected. Or just simply is requesting their full energy that may be manifested outside through bad behaviour or lack of inspiration on projects that may give them an annoying feeling of inferiority and not good enough.

All these will be visible through the way they act and that is the moment in which you can interfere and help. The moment you see your kid is feeling stuck on a specific school project and he feels like has no solution to his problems ask him to stop for a while and take a longer break.

During the break encourage him to do some exercise that will solicit his body, maybe jump around or do some squats for a few minutes while focusing on their breath. Once he stops jumping have him place his hand on his chest, and pay attention to how his heartbeat and breathing feels. Turning his attention to the physical body and how this feeling is a wonderful way to redirect the focus. With this new burst of energy, your child will feel a new motivation to complete the previous task.

7. Create a snow jar

Search for and bring on the table a jar with a lid on. Allow your kid to paint it or decorate it as he wants and makes him feel happy. Make sure you don’t forget to buy clear glue and polystyrene bean balls, the very small ones. Fill the jar up 3/4 of the way with water. Next, add the clear glue and polystyrene balls and mix them very well. Now, once this step is fulfilled, seal the lid and you are ready to play.

First, explain to him how it works and what this jar means. You can make it clear the jar is like his mind and the little balls are his thoughts, sometimes calm other times angry and all over the place.  Make him shake the jar when he feels anxious or upset and remain still while the white balls settle. Encourage him to think about how his thoughts are running inside the jar. Once the little white balls settle down into the bottom of the jar, the mind also becomes calmer. You just need to make him pay attention to the little details and let him imagine what’s happening inside his body by embracing every new sensation.

8. Enjoy a healthy snack

Have you ever noticed how a small child is not very interested in how his food is looking, smelling or what texture has? I am under the impression we develop an interest (or maybe not) in these details over time, while we became adults. But what if you go ahead and prepare your kid for appreciation in a different way?

Food is important. Most of us don’t eat just to live, but we live to eat and that’s because we love food. Start early with your kid, teach him to practice mindful eating by giving him healthy snacks (something that you know he loves and enjoys eating), such as a banana or a granola bar. Before he tries the tasty snack, make him aware to stop for a moment to look at his food, focusing on its shape, texture and colour. Have him describe how the fruit feels in his little hands. After the first bite, tell him to think and describe the flavour, what is he associating the taste with and how he feels the texture of the treat. 

Mindful eating has several benefits including for kids. In addition to calming down anxiety, may develop in time, by allowing the body to more easily recognize fullness. Focusing on the experience can also make a snack seem more enjoyable.

To sum up…

Having calm and mindful children is everyone’s dream. And the good news is you can help your child to become one. In this post, I have covered all the bets mindfulness activities that I have tired not only with my own child but also with family members and friends’ kids.

Below you can find a list of best mindfulness activities for children.

1. Focus on the 5 senses
2. Colourful drawing
3. Soap bubbles playing 
4. Play in nature
5. Analyze each other heartbeat
6. Practice friends breathing
7. Create a snow jar
8. Enjoy a healthy snack