“The Mindful zone is a place to get in touch with how you are feeling inside and come back to your breath.”
The Mindful Zone is a place to support students in using mindfulness to self-regulate. A number of recent studies have found that mindfulness can be a very helpful first step in helping students learn how to self-regulate and come back to a place where they will be much more ready and able to process what happened and think through the impact and consequences of their actions. For example, a school in Baltimore partnered with Holistic Life Foundation and successfully piloted the use of a Mindful Moment Room in place of detention and saw a drop in suspensions. To start, we recommend using the Mindful Zone in tandem with restorative practices and letting go of old discipline procedures.
The Mindful Zone is a place where students can time-in versus time-out by having a safe place to cool down, take a mindful break, and practice their mindful skills to come back to a place of greater self-regulation, stability, and self-awareness.
An ideal Mindful Zone would have:
● Copies of reflective worksheets
● Writing and coloring materials, (sometimes students prefer to color to
process what they are feeling rather than write.)
● One or two tactile objects such as pipe cleaners, soft blanket, or stuffed animals.
Download our reflective worksheets below that can be used in the Mindful Zone. We also recommend having a computer and headphones on hand if possible where students can listen to some of our recorded mindful sits, accessible online at: www.mindfullifeproject.org