Resources

Smiling Mind is based in Australia but its impact is felt worldwide. The free Smiling Mind meditation app has been developed by a team of educators and psychologists who use evidence-based research to approach mental health education for children.

Smiling Mind’s meditation programs help reduce behavioral problems and emotional outbursts in school-aged children. They also offer helpful resources to parents and adults, including a weekly podcast that features interviews with mental health experts. While some free resources are available on the website, certain content can only be accessed via a paid subscription.

If you’re an educator who wants to introduce mindfulness to the classroom, the Mindful Schools website is an excellent resource. This nonprofit organization has trained over 60,000 parents, teachers, and school administrators on the best way to incorporate mindfulness in classes from kindergarten to twelfth grade. It’s also an excellent tool for parents who are homeschooling their kids.

The main feature of the Mindful Schools website is their series of online mindfulness designed for students in the K-5 grade levels. The ten-class series features fun and interactive mindfulness activities that deal with everything from mindful movement to eating habits.

Sesame Street on PBS has been educating generations of children about a wide array of topics for over fifty years. It’s not surprising that they would be at the forefront of wellness for children. Sometimes kids connect best with new concepts when familiar characters present them.

Breathe, Think, Do With Sesame isn’t technically a website - it’s an app. Through the app, kids can learn breathing techniques and exercises to help them deal with big emotions like anxiety, anger, and frustration. It’s great for teaching young children the basic principles behind mindfulness.

Teens and college students who grew up with smartphones are often more comfortable using apps than visiting traditional websites. Thanks to its simple and streamlined approach, The Mindfulness App is a popular app for students and newcomers to mindfulness and meditation.

The Mindfulness App kicks off with a guided five-day introduction to the principles of Mindfulness. From there, users can explore the library with various courses and guided meditation practices that last anywhere from three to thirty minutes. The diverse content allows people to customize their experiences. But the biggest selling point of this free app is its timer function that allows you to track your statistics and monitor your progress.

The Insight Timer app and website go far beyond mindfulness. This comprehensive app hosts over 30,000 free audio recordings that deal with various self-help topics. The app contains a series of comprehensive lectures addressing everything from sleep problems to anxiety management to stress relief. They also offer a series of guided meditations and music tracks.

While this app isn’t explicitly oriented toward mindfulness, it does provide great foundational information. And because it’s free, it’s ideally suited for college students on a tight budget.

As the name indicates, the Mindful website is a great resource for people just beginning to explore mindfulness. The entity behind the website, Mindful Communications, is a public benefit corporation. While they are technically a for-profit corporation, they aim to provide a positive impact by generating social good. The Mindful website does that by offering courses on subjects including: 

• Meditation
• Focusing
• Achieving calm
• Incorporating movement into mindfulness
• Sleep
• Compassion

Enjoy a robust library of meditations, stretches, relaxing sounds, and nature scenes in the Calm app. The Daily Calm is a ten-minute meditation that focuses on a new strategy each day. It is the perfect way to build a consistent classroom mindfulness practice. The Kids collection features age-appropriate series of meditations that are ideal for students.

Calm’s Sleep Stories are just what teachers need to stop nighttime ruminations about work and drift off into a peaceful sleep. Through the Calm School Initiative, teachers can access a free subscription to the app and resources for introducing mindfulness in schools.

In addition to a wide variety of meditations, the Headspace app offers courses for specific mindfulness needs. This includes appreciation, focus, self-esteem, and many more. For troublesome nights, Headspace can help teachers relax into sleep. Its collection of nighttime audio includes Sleepcasts, Nighttime SOS, and Sleep Radio. The Move collection features workouts of varying intensity. This will help teachers commit to their physical well-being as well as their mental wellness.

Headspace for Educators, teachers can take advantage of free access to the app. This includes self-care resources, mindfulness tips, and age-appropriate mindfulness videos for students.

Based on Dan Harris’s book of the same title, the Ten Percent Happier app assembles some of the world’s most renowned meditation teachers to make mindfulness accessible to even the most hesitant skeptics. Its courses introduce topics from the basics of mindfulness to the science of meditation and everything in between.

The app offers single meditations of varying lengths. It focuses to meet the individual’s meditation goals. Relaxing sleep meditations to ease stressed teachers into sleep is available. A “Talks” feature supplements one’s meditation practice by exploring deeper issues. Though the app is geared toward an adult audience, meditations such as “One Minute of Mindfulness” and “Proof That You Don’t Suck at Meditation” could appeal to more mature high school and higher education students. In response to the pandemic, Ten Percent Happier is now offering free six-month access to the app to teachers and other essential workers.