Teaching Expertise

Anxiety in children may not affect their grades, but it does hurt their ability to learn. Creating kid-friendly anxiety management exercises is easy, and you and your students will enjoy the resulting activities.

As their teachers and mentors, our responsibility is to help them succeed academically. It is essential to remember that our goal is not to help children pinpoint the specific causes of their anxiety but rather to teach them strategies for dealing with it whenever it arises.

1. Back-to-School Notes

Looking for a creative way to help anxious students? Providing notes for students to take whenever they’re feeling anxious is a great way to relieve any feelings of anxiety throughout middle school. 

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2. Breathing Exercise

Sometimes deep breathing is all students need to get their heads on straight and their anxiety under control. It can be challenging to go through the day-to-day in middle school. Therefore, ensuring students have a little brain break here is vital for their development. 

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3. Rock Painting

Taking the time to plan out a pebble design and executing it is great to focus your students’ minds. It will help to take them off of things that could be causing high anxiety levels and focus on a creative, simple activity.  

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4. Teaching Emotional Regulation

Teaching emotional regulation and offering accurate information on anxiety might help students feel less confused or ashamed. Describe how anxiety is a common and normal experience that be properly addressed. Use a graphic organizer like this to help your students

  • Learn,
  • Understand,
  • And cope with outside effects on emotions. 

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5. Writing Activities

Having students talk about their everyday worries through anonymity gives them the space to better their mental health. Activities like this help students build empathy towards each other and better understand their own and others’ mental health. 

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6. Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)

EFT helps relieve stress, phobias, trauma, and uncertainty in youngsters. According to research, tapping may reduce the mental and physical effects of burnout and stress.

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7. Mindful Coloring

Providing students with mindful color can help to alleviate the effects of worry. The Amygdala, which is the part of your brain that controls fear, can calm down when you color. This can provide students with the same feeling as meditating, simply by helping to calm down thoughts, making students more aware and calm. 

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8. Affirmation Cards for Kids

Affirmations may boost confidence and foster an attitude of growth while combating negative, self-defeating ideas. Because of this, affirmations are helpful for kids who struggle with feelings of worry and other anxiety symptoms. 

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9. 5-4-3-2-1 Journal Exercise

Providing positive coping skills is vital if your students suffer from anxiety symptoms. Anxiety worksheets that help students grow themselves will help reduce anxiety and provide a coping technique for an anxiety attack. Grounding activities help the brain to locate the body by recognizing the items in the immediate environment.

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10. What do I Want to Talk About? 

This fun activity is great for an anxiety group. Children with anxiety may feel shy to share their feelings. Therefore, it’s important to help students cope with childhood anxiety in a space they feel safe. Giving them different options for a conversation about anxiety could help lead a counseling activity. 

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11. 10 Minutes Too…

Christie Zimmer provides different creative writing journal prompts for students to spend 10 minutes reflecting, check-in, or talking about different things. This is a great way for teachers to spot anxiety warning signs while also giving students the critical skills to understand their emotions. 

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12. The Destress Corner

I absolutely love this idea and will definitely be integrating it into my classroom soon. This is a great way to enhance student and teacher nonverbal communication skills by providing students with the space to be able to express and let out their worries. 

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13. Where’s Waldo

According to Counseling Today, Where’s Waldo is an age-appropriate group counseling activity. While completing a Where’s Waldo activity, it’s important to have a counseling plan in place. Have pieces of paper ready and have students write down the feelings they feel as they go through the activity. 

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14. Mindfulness

Middle school children can benefit from mindfulness. Being mindful involves paying close attention to what is happening right now and recognizing when your focus starts to wander. It is an ongoing state of consciousness. 

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15. Is It Stress or Anxiety? 

Learning the difference between anxiety and stress can be one of the first steps to getting students to open up and be vigilant toward their emotions. TED talks are a great way to help students how properly evaluate new or challenging concepts. 

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16. Anxiety Explained

Sometimes providing tweens and teens with definitions is the best way to help them cope with different emotions and feelings. This video provides students with the perfect definition of anxiety through engaging and educational content. 

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17. Tennis Ball Toss

High levels of resilience provide protection against a variety of mental health problems. To mitigate the effects that being bullied or suffering trauma may have on a person’s mental health, it is important to provide students with coping mechanisms.

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18. Box Breathing

Box breathing is a crucial coping skill for dealing with anxiety and stress. It’s a quick and effective relaxation method that can restore a peaceful rhythm to students’ breathing. It can help students focus by calming and clearing their thoughts.

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19. Art Therapy

Art therapy aims to help learners heal and cope with anxiety. It can help students feel a sense of calm, expression, and self-awareness. This video combines both mindfulness and meditation while also giving students the space to be creative. 

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20. Anxiety Survival Kit

An anxiety survival kit can contain so many different objects. This is something that’s totally up to the teacher’s discretion, as well as district mandates. Providing an anxiety survival kit in the classroom can give students a safe space to cope with their anxieties.

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