Winter is here! These cold winter days can mean lots of time cooped up inside with little opportunity for children to release energy. For many who already struggle with regulating, this season can feel especially hard. Librarians can step in to teach and model mindful strategies to help them feel more grounded.
Mindfulness in the Library
Practicing mindfulness is important to help children regulate, sustain their attention, and manage their emotions. As librarians, we can subtly infuse mindful practices into our programming to support kids. One strategy is to use cozy picture books to offer winter relief, as blogger Erika Hogan shared. Another strategy you could try is implementing “One Mindful Minute” of deep breathing or other stress-reducing activity into your programs. To take things a step further, you could try building an entire activity or program that is centered around mindfulness. As a Certified Yoga Teacher, I have a whole toolkit of activities I incorporate into my classes. Many of these mindfulness exercises can be done without any specific yoga training! Below, I will share a few winter themed activities and techniques that you could implement this season. Please note that these activities can be modified and scaled to fit your needs depending on the age range of the children.
Winter Mindfulness Activities
- Hot Chocolate Breathing
In this deep breathing visualization exercise, children are prompted to imagine holding a big mug of hot chocolate. The children take a deep breath in, and when they breathe out, they can imagine their breath cooling down their mug. I usually do a few rounds of breathing and then we pretend to drink our delicious hot cocoa together.
- Happy Place Snow Globes
Thinking about places that make us happy and safe can help us to feel calm in times of stress or unhappiness. When kids can conjure up the feelings associated with a “happy place” they can support themselves in regulating back to a stable headspace. There are a few different directions this activity could take. The first is a simple Happy Place meditation where you guide children to close their eyes and think of the sounds, smells, and feelings of their favorite place. They can imagine putting this happy place into a snow globe to keep safe in their memories, or draw a picture of it on paper.
You could also physically create snow globes in a crafting activity. Using plastic snow globe jars, purchased from places like Amazon or Walmart, children can draw their Happy Place on paper and insert it into the snow globe as a physical keepsake item.
- Snowy Senses
Using our senses to notice what’s around us in the present moment can help to ground and center us. “Snowy Senses” is essentially “5-4-3-2-1 Grounding” but with a clever snowy name for the season. Children are prompted to notice 5 things they see, 4 things they feel, 3 things they hear, 2 things they smell, and 1 thing they taste. I always invoke the power of imagination for the smell and taste senses, encouraging them to pretend to taste their favorite food.
How have you tried to implement mindfulness into your programming? Let us know in the comments below!
Joannie Lauria is the Youth Services Consultant at the Suffolk Cooperative Library System in New York. She is also a Certified Yoga Teacher specializing in yoga for children.