Teaching high school can be a joy and a challenge. It’s common for kids this age to face difficulties with their mental health like depression and anxiety. They might also be dealing with added pressures in their lives, including at home, at school, and in their relationships.
The practice of mindfulness can help high school students navigate these challenges and be more engaged at school. But teachers are already busy, and it can be difficult to start a mindfulness program from scratch.
Using Calm Classroom’s mindfulness curriculum for high school students can help.
What is a Mindfulness Curriculum?
As you probably already know, mindfulness is a holistic practice, based in ancient Asian philosophy, that teaches people how to maintain non-judgmental awareness of the present moment.
Anyone can benefit from mindfulness, including K-12 students. Research has found that practicing mindfulness has many benefits, including reducing stress and anxiety, lowering blood pressure, and helping people manage depression.
Anyone can start practicing mindfulness at any time. However, most people are stuck on where to start. This is especially true for educators who may be looking to teach mindfulness to their students. You may already be a mindfulness practitioner, but how can you explain this powerful practice in a way that young people can understand?
A mindfulness curriculum can be an enormously helpful resource. Just like you might have a school curriculum to teach math or writing, a mindfulness curriculum lays out the process of teaching mindfulness to kids. A good mindfulness curriculum built by experts designs mindfulness activities in a way that is easily accessible to both you and your students.
You don’t need to scramble for ways to encourage mindfulness practice in your students. A good mindfulness curriculum can take care of all of that, while still giving you the flexibility to adapt the lessons how you see fit.
How Mindfulness Helps High School Students
There are so many research-backed benefits of mindfulness for high school students. Adolescence is a hard time in life – packed with academic and social pressure, relationship challenges, identity-building, puberty hormones, and more. Mental health conditions like depression and anxiety are also very common in this age group.
Mindfulness is not a magic pill for adolescent growing pains. However, research shows that it is effective for helping teens across many different areas, including:
- Decreasing stress and anxiety
- Increasing resilience during stressful times
- Lowering depression symptoms
- Reducing intrusive thoughts
- Improving focus and attention
- Increasing empathy and optimism
- Reducing aggression
- Strengthening emotion regulation skills
- Improving health
- Increasing overall sense of well-being
As a high school teacher, you have a lot of influence. By implementing a mindfulness curriculum in your high school classroom, you can help your students benefit from this practice, improve their emotional wellness, and come to class more engaged and ready to learn.
Calm Classroom’s Mindfulness Curriculum for High School Students
Calm Classroom is here to support you. Our high school mindfulness curriculum, specifically designed for high school students, makes it easy, sustainable, and stress-free for you to implement age-appropriate mindfulness lessons in your classroom.
Every exercise is short – only around 3 minutes long – to make it as easy as possible for you to pull a Calm Classroom activity out when you need it and use it right away. We believe that human connection is more important than ever in today’s world, which is why we’ve made it so teachers can easily implement our mindfulness curriculum without the use of any app or digital platform.
The Calm Classroom middle & high school mindfulness curriculum includes 42 mindfulness exercises for this age group that are easy to teach and learn. The activities include:
- Breathing
- Stretching
- Focusing
- Stretching
Our curriculum also includes guidance for you, the teacher, on how to effectively implement these activities into your already busy classroom schedule. One thing that high school teachers often worry about is how to get buy-in from their students. The Calm Classroom curriculum offers guidance on how to introduce the program and how to engage your high school students with leadership opportunities and more.
How to Get Started With Our School Mindfulness Program
If you’re a high school teacher looking for a school-based mindfulness curriculum, Calm Classroom can help. We are one of the nation’s largest providers of school-based mindfulness. Our developmentally-appropriate mindfulness curricula make it easy for teachers to quickly implement mindfulness activities that your students will love.
You can get access to our digital high school mindfulness manual, which includes exercises, audio recordings, and other content. Every purchase of a physical manual (these can be good to have on hand in the classroom) comes with a year subscription to our digital program.
You can also choose to train your high school’s teachers in how to implement these exercises through our e-learning course or train-the-trainer program.
Sign up to try Calm Classroom for free and see for yourself how it can support your high school students.
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