Calm-down strategies for kids: a rich, open lesson for mixed ages

Hey there guys, welcome to another Picnic Planning session. This is where we ditch the worksheet, come together to make learning as real life as possible. So if you're a teacher, a parent or a homeschooler who wants to bring rich tasks to your kids, this is the place for you. Today, we're gonna plan a really great wellbeing lesson that you can run with your kids tomorrow. And the big emphasis on this is that it's for your kids, not any kid.

Let's get straight into this. I have a link to the free planner, it's in the description. This is the one I'm using now. Today's question. What can we do to feel calm?

Comes from two real girls. It's actually published in our second issue. The first girl, Ella, she's 11 from Epsom. And for her, it's reading or colouring with music on that really calms her down. And for Ayla, she's 10 from Goornong.

She nestles in with a book next to the fire in winter. Love it. So we know what our question is. Thanks girls. Now's the time to make the launch as engaging as possible for your kids.

So before we talk about calm, you need to make sure your kids can feel it. It's almost impossible to ask a kid to dig into an emotion when they're really not feeling it themselves, right? So one thing that I've done in the past in the classroom with more success than I thought I would, was to go through like a really mini meditation with the kids. You might put some music on and say, do it with me, sit back, feet flat, big breath in through the nose, let it out slowly. And listen, if that's not your cup of tea, don't worry.

There's a really great free app called Smiling Mind. And it's made for kids and built for Aussie classrooms. But you can access it anywhere in the world, which is great. My kids in the classroom always respond so well to it. It's worth, I think, building into your daily routine or your weekly routine at the very least.

One thing you can do is to ask your kids about a time they felt really relaxed. What did it feel like in their head and in their body? So we're gonna put these ideas down on our planner. Another great option is to share how you like to relax. So it might be, you know, doing some drawing or going for a walk at the beach or maybe putting some headphones in and listening to music, but then ask the kids what they noticed in you that changed.

So the more personal you can make this launch, the better, and the more they'll lean in and really wanna access the task. So I also think one thing here is to just pick one. So for a second, pause your video and pick the one that you think is gonna engage your kids the most. Remember, we're building this lesson for your kids, not for anyone else's. So when they're at the point where they are feeling that emotion or they've linked to a time when they've felt that, that's when you pose the question.

So what can we do to feel calm? And you'll notice that everyone's strategies can be so different. And it's worth experimenting with one that maybe they've never tried before. So what I mean by that is if you've got five kids at a homeschool or you've got 25 kids in the classroom, it's great for kids to be open to other strategies that kids use. Now, just a tip on timing.

If you run this the week before school holidays, that's a really valuable time to do this for kids because that's when they start to lose their routine. And that's not just the kids, that's the whole family. So they know that if they're feeling a bit unsettled, they can head off and use one of these strategies we're building now to actually relax. How good is that? Okay, now we're gonna move into the most important part of the planning.

And it's probably the bit that gets missed the most. It's the Anticipate stage. So before the kids start, we put on our student hat and we guess we anticipate where they will go with this session. We call it a trajectory of learning, but really it's just fancy words for the path the kid will most likely take during this lesson. So the way I'm going to break up this trajectory of learning for this lesson is into three stages.

The first step is comfort objects. So it could be like a teddy, a blanket. It's all the smells, the feels, and a lot of littlies start here, but I've got to admit there's a lot of oldies that still rely on these strategies and that's okay. There's even adults that use it too, but it's a really good place to start. And the second step that they kind of move towards is the outside of them things.

So it could be music on, could be like a cosy spot that they rely on, that they can head to. I guess like the girl at the beginning, I can't remember her name right now, but she had the fire in winter that she sat near that made her feel really good. That's where Ella and Ayla both are in this section. So I've just written down two pretty generic answers here, but for your kids, you know them better than anybody else. You might know the specific places that they rely on to calm down.

So that's something that you can definitely add in based on your kids. And now the third step, this is the big one, it's basically the top of the ladder. They're the strategies that we or kids can do ourselves. So they're the inside me strategies. So, you know, no teddy, no music.

It's literally just what you can do with your body, the stuff that's inside. So for littlies, they might use a technique like, have you seen blowing out the candles where they go... When they bring them down to five or 10, but for an older kid, they might actually have a technique, a proper technique that they use. They might've been inspired by an athlete who's setting themselves to kick a goal or to run a race, but it could even be more intrinsic feelings that they've got as well. But once again, these are strategies that you might, may have actually seen your kids display.

So you can write down the very specific ones for your kids. One that I used to do with my kids, I called it an FS. So FS as in fake smile. So if they're feeling worried about something, unsettled, anxious, they did an FS. And try it now, put on a fake smile.

This is fake, no it's not. But it'll actually change the way you're feeling and help your body relax. So I used to do that with my kids and they loved it. They thought it was the funniest thing 'cause they'd accuse other kids of the FS, which was the cutest thing as well. Anyway, so the big question for you right now, while you're anticipating, is to think, well, where are my kids right now?

I know I've just dumped a few little examples, but you could brainstorm a lot more. But where are your kids sitting? Are they relying on comfort objects? Are they more the things that are places and outside of them? Or are they relying on their own strategies that they've built?

And then the next question is, well, what can we do to move them to the next one? And the big thing here is that we won't be telling them, but we can just ask really great questions. So probing questions to get them thinking about the next step. That's really valuable because you want them to get the answers from within or from within their friends. And it could be something as simple as, after they've just had a bit of a brainstorm and a dump in the classroom, they go for a gallery walk and they see other strategies that kids are doing.

Hugely successful, but it means they can build on them, they can ask questions, and suddenly they're growing their knowledge bank here. If you're doing this at home, it's one of those things you can just do one-to-one with your kid as well, ask great questions and say, well, what else could you do? What's your next step? What is holding you back from feeling good? There's something else I always like to think about, the mixups.

So they're like your misconceptions or misunderstandings that kids can have when you enter a task. One thing that I think always comes up here is kids will say zoning out is relaxing. So having a screen on, turning my brain off. So it's not a mistake, but it's not really relaxing because the question it opens is, is that calm or are you just feeling distracted? Are you calming your body or just not looking at what's bugging you?

So don't hand them the answer. You ask how your body feels after an hour of that. And I know after an hour scrolling on the phone, my body, my eyes, my brain is exhausted. It's not relaxation. And something else to consider is curriculum.

So just a quick one, wherever you live, this lesson fits with your curriculum. So for Victoria or Australia, we've got the wellbeing section, which we call the general capabilities. So self-regulating, managing your own feelings, emotional literacy, we've got words for them. You've just gotta pull them out of your curriculum, have a quick squiz and see where they're gonna fit. The other big thing is, I'll come back to those questions, is just to have a couple in your back pocket so that you know you've got a couple of probing questions that you can rely on no matter what stage the kids are at.

So you don't wanna use a prompting question because that actually gives the answer away. So when you say something like, "Hey, would deep breaths help?" The kid goes, "Yeah." And that's done, they've done no thinking. So a probing question encourages kids to keep thinking and to come up with the answers for themselves. So for a little kid, like a littlie, you might say, "What does your body do when you're feeling calm?" For a middle, you might say, "Well, what if your teddy wasn't there?" For an older kid, you might have a question like, "Well, which one actually works when you're at your angriest? And how do you know?

Can you feel the difference there?" Now, the beauty of this lesson is at the end of it, once they've all shared their strategies, their techniques, and they've had a look at each other's ideas, you hand it back to them. All right, so what are we gonna do with all this? How do we capture it so that we can actually use it? That's a real question for kids, and it begins to shape what the lesson becomes because we want these kids to be reaching for these strategies when they actually need them. So if you're a bit short on time, you might still share around the classroom, but if you want something to really stick, maybe the kids are making a poster for the bedroom wall so that when they're feeling heightened, they can look at it, they can grab the strategy they need, and actually act on it.

Maybe your kids love a bit of drama so they can actually role-play, act out some things in the classroom. Sounds pretty fun. Great, guys, so you've just done everything on the planner that you need to do before the task. Nice work. We have less space here for you to take notes during the lesson.

So this might be, you might focus on four or five kids in the classroom you really wanna learn about for this. If you're a homeschooler, I've seen people divide it up so they can get all of their kids on here. Just take a few notes on the things that you actually see. It also means at the end of the year, if you're a homeschooler, you've got evidence that you can show the department on how much your kids have learned, which is incredible. It's also evidence to show how far your kids have come just in one lesson, and then to be able to pull this out in a year's time and think where they're at then compared to where they are now, it's a pretty exciting and rewarding thing for a parent or a teacher to do.

Okay, so we're moving into, which is almost my favourite part. It's the Where to next. And it's where you basically look at where are some holes or maybe some gaps in the learning that I can create a lesson on tomorrow, a fun lesson and another rich open task to help push my kids a little bit further. So maybe your kids were stuck in the outside me phase, so they were relying on places or music. You could pose the question the next day, what if you were at school and you needed that same feeling?

What could you do to get that same feeling? It could be a challenge like build a dream relaxo cabin. So that's a space where they can just fully chill out. What's in there? I can also see quite a bit of maths coming through there, so that gets me excited.

You could also focus on your internal strategies for kids. So if you've got a kid who loves footy or soccer, you could say, let's go watch a goal kicker before he kicks, what's he doing with his breathing? That's your role model. So a kid who loves planes, they could research how an air controller stays calm. It's the same launch.

You're basically doing the same lesson, but it's interest-led and that really gives your kids that big in. So that's it. Once again, you can't really fill this in before you start because it totally relies on what your kids are doing up here. But I just think it's so cool to have some ideas in the back of your head so that you can think, well, where to next? And it goes from being just a standalone lesson to a series of lessons that go so much deeper with a kid.

It's building knowledge out rather than taking the next step, which I love to do with my kids. Okay, guys, so that's it. Nothing to do if you've already finished your planner, well done. Go and run this lesson with your kids. I'd genuinely love to know what kind of strategies they came up with.

And if you enjoyed it, here's a little bit of thinking up here somewhere that you might wanna follow. But if you want more lessons, this is the playlist to go and check out. All right, guys, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Yes. The launch and the questions are the same one to one. Ask what else they could do and what their next step is, and swap the gallery walk for a chat about the strategies the two of you use.

The week before school holidays. That is when routines slip, for kids and the whole family, and a strategy they built themselves is there when they feel unsettled.

Don't hand them the answer. Ask how their body feels after an hour of it. Is that calm, or just distracted?