Hot as a chili: Managing big emotions for tamariki
This is the final post in our series about using the garden for mindfulness. These activities are often part of the Garden to Table programme in schools, but we wanted to share them for whānau use at home too, as tamariki manage uncertainty around the COVID-19 situation and returning to school.
Previous posts have covered creative ways to breathe and techniques for mindfulness and grounding. Today we’re going to talk about things we can do when we have big feelings.
A few tips for managing big emotions
Remind myself it is never okay to hurt others.
Take 3 deep breaths or go into my head and count to 10.
Remember that I need to use my words to explain how I feel and what I want to happen.
Ask for help to solve the problem.
Take time to calm myself. Using the techniques in the previous posts might help.
8 ways for tamariki to start calming themselves
Explicitly teaching kids to use these techniques ahead of time will give them strategies to use whenever they are feeling angry.
Take a deep breath: breathing deeply helps your body relax and calm down more quickly, especially when you are angry.
Count to 5: count to 5 slowly, either aloud or in your head. It will give you time to stop and think before you react to something that made you feel angry. This helps you learn to control your impulses.
Blow into your hands: Take a deep breath and blow onto your hands. This will give messages about the strength of your breath back to your brain and help you relax as you concentrate on your breathing.
Put your hands in your pockets.
Make a fist and relax it: Squeeze your hands tightly shut and then relax them. It will help to let go of the tension you are holding in your body because you got upset.
Acknowledge the triggers: It is really helpful to understand what happens to your body when you get angry. Think about what your face feels like and where you can feel tension in your body.
Do a body scan: Start at your head and slowly focus on each part of the body, moving down to your toes. When you find an area of tension, stop and relax those muscles for a moment before you carry on.
Ask for a hug: When you feel like one, a hug can make everything better. Ask someone you feel comfortable with to give you one.
Ideas for when things are running hot
Often asking an upset child to take a deep breath is too hard. You can use an outside area to help them try this activity instead. Pick a piece of grass or pick up a leaf, lay it on a flat hand and blow it off with the biggest breath. Slow your breath and try different types of breath. Repeat until the effect of deep breathing is reached.
Scrunching dry leaves is a great stress release or calming activity for students who need it. The scrunched leaves can be added to the compost. If this works well for your tamariki, they can collect leaves and store them in an open air bin.
Using a parachute or a piece of fabric, cover the surface in leaves. Have different people hold the corners and move the parachute up and down vigorously, tossing the leaves into the air. The leaves can symbolise tensions or anger that you are getting rid of.
Heavy work: Using the large muscle groups in the body (think quads and biceps) not only works the muscles and joints, it stimulates the proprioceptive receptors which give us our sense of body awareness, how it relates to space, how it moves and how the different parts are related, helping to develop gross motor skills. Most importantly for many tamariki though, it can regulate the neurologic system and activate the organising centres of the brain resulting in a calm and focused brain and body.
Kids who need it will benefit from the sensory input of engaging the large muscle groups by carrying something heavy. It might be filling a bucket or watering can with water and watering the garden, hammering in posts, or filling the wheelbarrow with something heavy that needs to be moved. Raking leaves, digging and moving soil or compost are more heavy work activities, and even bending at the hip to check seedlings or reaching up to touch the branches of a tree.
Of course, it is important to make sure that children are using safe practices to do heavy work. Make sure they are using their backs safely and that heavy work is at a weight that they can handle!
Working with soil not only enhances the tactile system but also exposes the body to bacteria that develops the immune system. It has been proven to improve mood and decrease anxiety. Kids can dig or sieve soil, turn compost, or even just get their hands dirty. Feeling and rubbing different plant parts can give some students a rewarding tactile experience.
Glitter jar: Fill a clear plastic bottle or jar ¾ of the way with water. Fill the rest with clear glue or a tube of glitter glue, glitter and a few drops of food colouring. Put the lid on. You might like to tape it on so it won’t get opened accidentally. When a child needs to feel calm, get them to shake their anger into the jar, then put the jar down and focus closely on the glitter. The glitter will swirl like the child’s own whirling thoughts. As the glitter slows down and settles, the child should slow their breathing down and settle their emotions. You might like to keep the glitter jar somewhere safe and easy to access in the garden space for when they need some time out.
Sensory input: Give a big tree a really tight hug. Grip really tight and tell it why you are feeling angry. If you can, breathe out and leave the feeling with the tree. The tree can breathe the anger into the air when you have gone.
This series was adapted from Garden to Table’s resources for schools. We hope you’ve found it useful!
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