Breathing is essential to life and of course we don’t have to teach our children how to breathe. They do it instinctively.
What we can do, however, is teach them how to use your breath to deal with stress and difficult situations. We can teach them to become aware of their breath in very playful ways like this simple exercise using colourful feathers.
Deep breathing calms the nervous system, it elevates the mood, strengthens the lungs and helps to relieve stress and tension. It can help with emotional problems and anxiety. Breathing exercises or pranayama are a very important part of yoga and we can use it even with our littlest yoginis!
Even if you don’t practice yoga with your kids, breathing is a very useful tool to help them to deal with challenging situations. This breathing exercise is very simple and effective you it’s fun for all ages!
Breathing with feathers
Get some colourful synthetic feathers (i.e. Poundshop, Amazon etc) and after letting them explore the feathers on their own encourage them to gently blow them without them falling off their hand. After that they can try blowing a little harder so that the feathers fall of the hand or try blowing them to each other!
Kids under three might find it difficult to blow them gently without spitting (!) and it might be more of a ffffffff (see video) but they will enjoy moving the feather around with their breath!
Don’t get discouraged if they only do it for a minute! That’s plenty for a two year old!
For older kids (from about five years) you can try a little obstacle course to make it more challenging! Ask them to blow the feathers around different objects towards a goal. Make it fun and you will see that they come up with their own ideas and games!
Feathers are not only for breathing… they are of course great for tickling as well so don’t forget to tickle each other’s neck and feet!
What a lovely post! I’m going to try this with my kids, I’d never really thought of helping them focus on their breathing before. I love your cute video too, so adorable!
Thank you! Try it! I’m sure they will love it! You can also use the feathers for arts and crafts afterwards!
lovely idea
Lovely idea! My girls were taught at school a little exercise which I really like. Its imaginary but still good – imagine a flower in one hand and a feather in the other; then the smell the flower (inhale) and blow the feather (exhale). xx
that’s lovely! I like that a lot! xx
This is so brilliant, and to be honest, not just for kids but adults too! Thanks for sharing such a simple, effective exercise! #sharethejoylinky
Thank you 🙂 hope you get a chance to try it with your family.
I love this post! I’m trying to encourage my 6 year old to do some yoga (not very successfully unfortunately…) but if I can start with the breath I may be on to something. Thank you. Simple but genius idea ! #Sharethejoy
The trick is not to call it yoga! Just call it a game and they will join in without realising or judging!
I can see this breathing exercise being a fun game for children. #sharethejoy
They love it!
What a clever way to help little ones (and not so little ones too actually) to focus on their breathing! And if there’s a tickle-fest at the end then all the better haha. Thanks so much for linking this up at #sharethejoy x
Tickle-fest is the best part of it of course! There is nothing better than laughter!
Looks like fun, going to have to try a few 🙂 x