Mindful awareness exercises have a lot of benefits for children. 
 

Mindfulness is ....?

Mindfulness is a state of being fully awake of a whole body-mind state of awareness in the present moment rather than thinking about the past or worrying about the future.

Mindful awareness can be strengthened through practice and can be developed through formal sitting meditation practices, or through informal everyday mindfulness activities : such as mindful walking, eating or conversation.  
 

Why mindfulness is good for children?

• Mindfulness improves their attention by learning focusing skills.  This helps their minds calm down and stronger.  As a result, by having better focus, they do better in sports, school or arts, and higher scores on tests.  
   

• Mindfulness training helps children to self-regulate their emotions, especially when dealing with tough emotions e.g. fear and anger, through breathing and other techniques. This helps them to decrease stress in daily lifes.
   
• Mindfulness increase compassion. Children learn to understand what another person is thinking or feeling, which helps building positive relationships.
   

How to teach children to practice mindfulness.

Here are some samples of easy and fun mindfulness exercises.

 Find ways to incorporate mindfulness into their daily-life activities. 

You can start slowly with a meditation practice of just five to 10 minutes a day.  

Keep it simple. 

Put simply, mindfulness is to noticce our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and anything that is around us and happening right now.

Don’t force them too much. Make it naturally.

If children aren’t interested in the activity, drop it. 

Sample of easy & fun mindfulness exercises

Listen to the bell. 

Use a singing bowl, a bell, a set of chimes or a phone app that has sounds on it. Tell them that you will make the sound, and they should listen carefully until they can no longer hear the sound (usually 30 seconds to a minute).
 

A breathing buddy.

Let children grab a stuffed animal, and then lies down on their back with their buddy on their belly. Tell them to pay attention on the rise and fall of the stuffed animal as they breathe in and out.

Noticing Walk. 

Let them walk for one minute and be completely silent and simply pay attention to all the surrounding sounds they can hear.  

 Practice mindful eating. 

Mindfully eating a raisin or a piece of chocolate is a great activity for kids. Let them notice  the outlooks, the ingrediences, the smell of the food they eat.

Remember make the exercises fun and keep it simple.