Here are some fun activities and coloring sheets you can do with your children as a way of introducing mindfulness to them:
My Amazing Emotions!
It can be hard for kids to identify what they’re feeling (it’s hard for adults, too!), so this “worksheet” helps children explore an emotion. They can use the emojis at the top to identify how they’re feeling, or use the blank face to the right to draw their own face!
Ask your child where in their body they experience the emotion. This helps them to identify the way that emotions are embodied, and allows them to tune in to the physical signs of an emotion before they may be cognitively aware of it. (For example, they may be able to identify that anger feels like a fire in their chest, nervousness makes them feel sick to their stomach, being scared feels really heavy in their legs, etc.)
You can reinforce to them through this exercise that their body is big enough to hold the emotion! Rarely is the emotion felt everywhere. Sometimes it’s helpful to ask your child, when they’re in the midst of a powerful emotion, “Is it in your toe?” “Can you feel it in your fingers?” Not only does this technique help to shift their attention, it also teaches them that they are big enough to hold their emotions.
As your child is work through an emotion, you can ask questions like,
- if it were an animal, what animal would it be?
- what is the animal doing? what’s its name?
- if it were a color, what color would it be?
- if it were a food, what food would it be?
- how does this emotion make you feel? how does it make you want to act?
What Makes Me Happy
It’s important that our children know what things make them happy. It’s kind of like how we identified the practices that nurture and sustain us and help us calm down as we focused on self-care. This coloring sheet encourages your child to identify the things that make him or her happy. They can either write or draw pictures in the shapes provided.
On the second page, your child can identify which of those things make them happy for just a few moments, and which things lead to long-term happiness. For example, “donuts” would go on the short-term list, and “my family” would go on the long-term list. For younger kids, you can have them cut out their shapes and glue them to the second sheet; older kids can just make a written list. This could lead to some interesting conversations about what your child likes, and on the importance of finding the things that truly sustain us!
Emotions and Emojis
The final download in this lesson contains several pages with emojis on them. You can use them in a variety of ways. You could print them on cardstock and cut them into flashcards. With younger children, it could be a game of identifying what the person is feeling. With older children, you could use the cards to play “emotion charades,” where someone acts out the emotion and people have to guess it. This is another way we can help our children understand the embodied nature of emotion, and it also helps them identify emotions in other people, which is a core component of empathy.
You could also use the images as a starting point for conversations. What emotion do you think this person is feeling? Why might they be feeling this way? Have you ever felt this way? When? What did you do about it?
These conversations about emotion are so important for our children — it’s helping them build an emotional vocabulary!