Activity
Back-to-Back Breathing
Help your students breathe easy with some back-to-back breathing! Back-to-back breathing is a great way to practice self-calming while also creating connection and developing trust.
What You Need:
- I Got Your Back worksheet
- Your body!
What You Do:
- Explain that you will spend some time practicing mindful breathing in a fun new way and then reflect on how we all need someone to "have our backs."
- Pair students off and have them first sit next to each other.
- Model sitting back-to-back with another student or teacher's aide.
- While seated back-to-back take some mindful breaths and try to feel each other breathing.
- Now have students sit back-to-back and try to first feel each others breathing and then try to match each others breathing.
- Have students take 10 mindful breaths back-to-back.
- Have students share what that felt like first in groups of four by joining two pairs and then take some comments for the whole class.
- Now ask, "What does it mean to have your back? Why is having someone's back or having someone have your back important?"
- After a few whole group shares have students complete the I Got Your Back worksheet.
Meena Srinivasan, MA, National Board Certified Teacher, is a leader in the fields of Mindful Awareness Practices (MAP) and Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). She is the author of Teach, Breathe, Learn: Mindfulness In and Out of the Classroom (Parallax Press, 2014) and SEL Everyday: Integrating Social and Emotional Learning With Instruction in Secondary Classrooms (Norton, 2019).
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