Classroom calmness is NOT easy to cultivate, but it’s possible. Here’s a few ideas and resources that have worked for me, thus far, in my self contained ED classroom.
Yoga
Yoga has been the beginning of my journey in creating a calm classroom. I LOVE teaching yoga to the kiddos. It’s a great brain break, helps with self control, and teaches so many skills that can be hard to target in other capacities. When I teach yoga, I personally do not use yoga videos. I find that following a person’s movements (whether it’s you, a gym teacher, or an outside instructor) is way more beneficial than having the students follow a screen. They need the immediate feedback and ability to modify that a live instructor can offer and a video cannot.
You don’t need mats, but I have found that they do help with boundaries. I created a DonorsChoose project to obtain yoga mats for my classroom a few years ago. Another idea is to ask students to bring in a beach towel, or you can grab them at a Dollar Tree or 5 Below when in season.
For the littles, I love using fun, creative poses with cute names. It helps with buy in, and makes it more kid-friendly. I use the big print outs of poses from my yoga and exercise bundle and make them into a schedule. The students can view the clip art kid making the pose and follow me.
For bigger kids, it might be fun to use actual pose names. It’s more age appropriate and would allow for easier generalization if the student were to actually attend a yoga class at a gym or studio. You could have the class watch a video clip of the pose, followed by you modeling for them, and the class doing the pose together.
Breathing
Breathing has been such a huge, important piece to our calmness in class. We do breathing exercises throughout the day as needed. Somedays we take breathing breaks 10x a day, and I am not kidding. We typically use the breathing exercises from my Yoga, Exercise, and Breathing product. I love how they are fun and creative for little ones. To TEACH breathing strategies, I use Lazy 8 Breathing. I use Zones of Regulation in my class, and have modified their “Lazy 8” structured breathing method. Each of my students has a laminated print out from my Zones of Regulation Pack and we do this together in whole group. This way, students understand what Lazy 8 Breathing is if they need to use it independently.
For other individual breathing strategies, I use the breathing visual from Melissa Finch’s Calm Down Kit. This gives a super structured breathing “schedule”.
What do you use in your classroom to teach calmness?