Activity
Five-Finger Relaxation
Tracing is a great technique for clearing your mind and relaxing. Help your child learn how to calm themselves down and clear their minds by tracing their hands.
What You Need:
- Just your hand and five fingers
What You Do:
- Talk to your child about different strong emotions, such as anger, stress, and sadness, and how their body responds to them.
- Tell your child that there are strategies for when they feel a strong emotion, and have them take a few deep breaths to see how breathing can calm them down.
- Share that their breath is always with them and can be a tool in helping them relax.
- Guiding their hands, show them how to trace around each finger with their opposite index finger.
- As they inhale, trace up the finger. As they exhale, trace down the finger.
- Practice on both sides for 10 deep breaths.
- This technique helps keep the mind from wandering, and going slow corresponds with deep breathing.
- Have your child practice breathing deeply using five finger relaxation, and join in whenever you need a reminder to stop and breathe as well.
About the author: 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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