3 Activities to Help Students Feel Grounded

Focus isn’t always a choice. When students are anxious, overwhelmed, or carrying stress from outside the classroom, their nervous systems can easily shift into survival mode, prioritizing safety over learning. By the time a student has become dysregulated, asking them to focus can make things worse.

A more useful approach is putting regular activities in place to help students feel grounded. Here are three activities—simple, preventive exercises drawn from mindfulness, drama, and actor training—that you can use to help your class feel more regulated. They’re designed to be used regularly to help students settle and come to their work in a more focused state.

Relaxation and Body Scan

• Description: A grounding focus exercise often used in actor training that helps students notice and release physical tension, supporting calm attention and bodily awareness.
• Grades: 3–8.
• Time: 10–20 minutes.
• Space: A room where students can lie down comfortably.
• Materials: Yoga mats or blankets (optional).

Ask students to find spots on the floor and lie down. Students may use mats and/or blankets if you have them. Eyes can be open or closed. Or you can practice this with students sitting at their desks. Invite students to begin by noticing their breathing without trying to change it. Explain that you will guide them through different parts of the body. For each area, they gently tense and scrunch the muscles, hold for a few seconds, and then release, noticing the difference between tension and relaxation. Begin with the hands. Ask students to scrunch their fists tightly. Hold for three to five seconds, then release completely. Move slowly through the body, including arms and shoulders, face, jaw, stomach, legs, feet.

After each release, pause for a moment and invite students to notice how that part of the body feels now. Once you have moved through each part of the body, invite students to scrunch all the muscles in their bodies and faces at once and then let go and rest quietly for a short while. You might like to put on some gentle music for them during this final relaxation phase. This exercise works best when there is no rush.

Looking Deeply at an Object

• Description: A calm, grounding exercise that helps students focus, tune in to their senses, and explore an object, or objects.
• Grades: 3–8.
• Time: 5–15 minutes.
• Space: A quiet classroom where students can sit comfortably at their desks.
• Materials: A simple object for each student, such as a pencil or pen.

Ask students to sit at their desk, each with a pen or pencil in their hand. You can also use something else everyone has access to—erasers, perhaps, or rulers. Explain that they are going to look deeply at their object, noticing details they may never have paid attention to before. Invite them to hold the object and notice its texture, weight, temperature, and shape. They might explore how an object feels in different parts of their hand or how the weight shifts when they move it.

Once students have explored their real object, explain that you are going to move on to imagining objects. Ask them to put the real object down and imagine a warm cup of hot chocolate in front of them. They can picture the shape of the cup, how it sits on the table. Invite them to slowly reach for the cup, noticing what the imaginary handle feels like, how their hand wraps around it, and whether the cup feels warm.

Pause here and let students know that scent and sensory memory can be powerful. Sometimes a smell, taste, or object can bring up uncomfortable feelings. If imagining hot chocolate feels unsettling or reminds anyone of a difficult memory, they are welcome to choose a different drink instead. They might imagine a cup of tea, a glass of orange juice, or any other drink that feels safe and comfortable.

Choice is an important part of trauma-informed practice. Invite the class to continue imagining the drink they have chosen. There is no right or wrong way to imagine an object. What matters is the experience. Next, you can ask the class to suggest other objects to explore: a bowl of ice cream, a smartphone, a snowball, a candle, a fluffy blanket, a paintbrush, a gemstone.

Guess the Leader

• Description: A simple circle-based focus game where students copy one leader’s movements while a detective tries to identify who the leader is.
• Grades: Pre-K, kindergarten, grades 1–3.
• Time: 5–10 minutes.
• Space: A space big enough for students to sit in a circle.
• Materials: None.

Have students sit in a circle and ask who would like to be the detective. Choose one student and ask them to face away and cover their eyes. Quietly select someone to be the leader of the group without saying their name aloud. The leader stays seated and performs simple repetitive movements for the rest of the group to copy, like tapping their head, stretching their arms, wiggling their fingers, or patting their knees.

Once the leader begins their first movement and everyone is copying them, invite the detective to stand in the center of the circle and guess who the leader is. They get three guesses. If the detective guesses correctly, choose a new detective and a new leader. Continue until everyone who wants a turn has gotten to be the detective or the leader—or both.