- How To Teach Meditation to Children:Help kids deal with shyness and anxiety and be more focused, creative and self-confident by David Fontana & Ingrid Slack
- The Calm Buddha At Bedtime: Tales of wisdom, compassion and mindfulness to read with your child by Dharmachari Nagaraja
- The Mindful Mandala Coloring Book by Lisa Tenzin-Dolma
How To Teach Meditation to Children:Help kids deal with shyness and anxiety and be more focused, creative and self-confident by David Fontana & Ingrid Slack
This is a great one-stop-book to learn how and why to bring meditation to children, whether they be your own or your students. This book very clearly lays out meditations for different age groups from 5-8 year old children to 15+, late adolescents and for different needs, such as creativity, relaxation and body awareness. The author has come up with fun and creative, and easy to follow, meditations with follow up exercises for home, daily life and school. One of the ones that immediately caught my eye was exercise #4 in the chapter about meditations for mindfulness. The exercise is about taking a familiar object and showing it upside down and having the kids draw it from this odd angle. The exercise is about perspective and focus and creativity. I use this exercise in my yoga class-which is just meditation in motion, and we turn yoga poses on their heels or backs or bellies and then recreate the poses from a different perspective. We can rename them and bring new qualities of them to light when they are taken from a different angle or a chair or are holding onto a cane. Our attention becomes more focused, our minds more creative as we experience gravity from another angle.
I really enjoyed this book and recommend it for it’s unique and creative meditation ideas. I highly recommend this accessible book and strongly agree with the author about having a practice of your own as a necessary element in the desire to bring this to children.
The Calm Buddha At Bedtime: Tales of wisdom, compassion and mindfulness to read with your child by Dharmachari Nagaraja
This is a lovely collection of read aloud stories on instilling wisdom, compassion and mindfulness into ours and our children’s lives and by using the age old art of story telling, these stories make it very easy to bring these qualities to children. The short tale with morals empower children to take these teachings into the world by learning about patience, honesty and trust.
At the back of the book, there is a section of very sweet and simple mindful meditation scripts that can be used to enhance the teachings of the stories. The index makes it very easy to find themes that work in with what you are teaching.
This is a wonderful book that opens the hearts and minds of all who share them. I highly recommend these calming and enlightening stories.
The Mindful Mandala Coloring Book by Lisa Tenzin-Dolma
This is a lovely coloring book with beautifully detailed and delicately drawn mandalas. The book is separated into three sections: Buddhist mandalas, Celtic mandalas and Healing mandalas and at the beginning of each section, a few colored examples are given. Included with each mandala are a description of that specific mandala, simple step-by-step instructions for its contemplation, a recommended color palette and a meaningful quote. Also, for added creativity and self-reflection, at the end of each section are blank mandala templates for you to create your own, personalized mandalas.
This is a wonderful book that is packed with information for contemplation and quiet-time self- reflection. It it the first coloring book that I have seen with all the elements of a mindful practice included in one place. Coloring is a great way to bring about contemplation, meditation and healing. This book is beautifully laid out. I am looking forward to choosing a mandala to color and contemplate! Namaste!
Thank you to Watkins Publishing for these books. All opinions expressed are my own.
I Am Uniquely Eve 