5 Parts of the Day.
Support your day with Mindfulness.
Mindfulness practices support well-being across the entire day. When integrated into the classroom, they strengthen students’ focus, emotional regulation, and learning readiness—creating the conditions for deeper engagement and academic success.
Good Morning Wake-Up
Mindfulness Practice: Body Scan
Mornings shape the tone of the entire day. The following practice helps students and teachers wake up with clarity, intention, and emotional steadiness.
Body Scan
Purpose: Get to know yourself better, learn to notice what and how you are feeling, through an expanded sensory relationship. Build self-awareness and support emotional regulation through broader understanding.
Description:
A body scan helps you tune in to tension, ease, energy, and sensation. Starting at the feet and moving to the crown of the head, notice contact points, muscles, bones, joints, organs, and energy. This awareness improves the ability to notice, feel, and self-regulate throughout the day.
End your scan with gratitude for your body—the vessel through which you move, think, feel, and experience life.
Activity Ideas
- Listen to a guided body scan meditation before getting out of bed in the morning: Body Scan Meditation.
- Compose and record your own body scan meditation.
- Practice before bed to soften your muscles and relieve tension.
Calm the Butterflies
Mindfulness Practice: Name It to Tame It
Butterflies – also known as the fluttery, anxious feeling in your stomach – occur when your brain predicts something stressful or risky is about to happen. Mindfulness practices signal to the brain, “I’m safe,” calming the sympathetic nervous system (the body’s stress response) and activating the parasympathetic nervous system (the body’s calming response).
Name It to Tame It
Purpose: Help students calm their nervous system by labeling what they’re feeling. When we put words to an emotion, the brain shifts from “reacting” to “understanding,” which helps students regain control, clarity, and regulation.
How:
- Pause and notice – Take a slow breath and pay attention to what’s happening inside—your body, your thoughts, and your emotions.
- Identify the Emotion – Choose a simple word to describe what you’re feeling: nervous, excited, sad, overwhelmed, frustrated, worried, tired, etc.
- Say It Out Loud or Silently – “I’m feeling nervous, frustrated, overwhelmed…etc.”
- Take One More Breath – After naming the emotion, take a slow inhale and exhale. This helps the brain shift from the emotional center (amygdala) to the thinking center (prefrontal cortex).
- Offer Yourself Support – Add a supportive phrase such as, “It’s ok to feel this way,” or “This feeling will pass.”
Activity Ideas
- Journal: Invite students to journal about their feelings. Sometimes we can be swept up by our environment, peer energy, or even a negative thought. Check in with the truth of why you are feeling what you feel.
- 3-Word Check-In: Invite students to write three words describing how they feel at the moment and circle the one that feels strongest. The circled word becomes the focus of their “Name It to Tame It” practice.
- Name It – Then Move It: Students name their emotion, then choose a regulating movement (e.g., stretch, hand on heart, slow inhale/exhale, gently shaking). This pairs emotion with a soothing action or movement to support regulation.
Get Back in the Zone
Mindfulness Practice: Default Mode Network Noticing
Getting back in the zone means noticing distractions without judgment and refocusing on the present moment.
Default Mode Network Noticing
Purpose: Help students understand when their brain has slipped into the Default Mode Network (DMN)—the mode of mind-wandering—and practice gently returning to the task. This builds metacognition, self-awareness, and focus.
How:
- Explain: The Default Mode Network is a group of brain areas that becomes active when your mind is not focused on a task. It’s the “mind-wandering network.” The DMN turns on when you’re daydreaming, thinking about the past or future, imagining, or drifting into your own thoughts. Mindfulness helps you notice when the DMN pulls your attention away, and gently shift back into the present moment so you can “get back in the zone.”
- Invite students to pause for 5 seconds and ask silently: “Is my mind here, or somewhere else?”
- If students notice their mind is wandering, invite them to take one slow breath and say silently, “Come back.”
- Re-engage with the task.
Activity Ideas
- Start-of-Class Attention Reset: Use this practice immediately after students arrive, especially after recess, lunch, or transitions, to shift them from mind-wandering mode to learning-readiness mode.
- Partner Reflection (1 minute): Partners share (without pressure or detail) whether they noticed their minds wandering and how they brought themselves back. Builds awareness and co-regulation.
- Reflection Journaling: Students reflect on a time during the day when they noticed their mind drifting and how they returned. This deepens the understanding of one’s own thought process and self-awareness.
Seventh Inning Stretch
Mindfulness Practice: Full-Body Stretch with Breath
The “Seventh Inning Stretch” invites students to pause, reset, and release tension through mindfulness, supporting calm focus and renewed energy for the remainder of the day.
Full-Body Stretch with Breath
Purpose: Release accumulated physical tension and re-energize the body while calming the mind.
How:
- Stand or sit tall.
- Inhale and raise your arms overhead, stretching fingers toward the sky.
- Exhale and lower your arms down by your sides.
- Roll your shoulders gently forward and backward.
- Take 3–5 slow, deep breaths, noticing any tension leaving the body.
Activity Ideas
- Use at the end of the day before packing up or dismissal.
- Encourage students to notice areas that feel tight and stretch them gently.
- Pair with a short reflection: “How does my body feel now compared to the start of class?”
Leave It at the Door
Mindfulness Practice: Mind Unwind
The following practice supports students in “leaving their day at the door,” allowing them to let go of the day’s events, reset their nervous systems, and move into what comes next—home, after-school activities, or work—with a sense of calm, grounding, and presence.
Mind Unwind
Purpose: Let go of lingering thoughts from the day, helping the brain transition from active learning to transition, reset, or rest.
How:
- Invite students to close their eyes or soften their gaze.
- Take one deep breath and think of one thing that’s still on their mind.
- Exhale and imagine that thought floating away like a cloud.
- Repeat with 1–2 more thoughts, then take one grounding breath and lift the gaze.
Activity Ideas
- Use before the final classroom reflection or journaling.
- Encourage students to notice how releasing thoughts affects their focus and mood.
- Pair with sensory grounding (e.g., feeling feet on the floor) for extra presence.
