Worrying is completely natural. Children will experience a build up of frustrations and disappointment in their little bodies and minds, and this will naturally cause them to worry. It is important to help our kids to understand what makes them anxious and then to guide them to find solutions for this. Offering comfort, reassurance, and helping to keep things in perspective can help our kids to manage these big feelings. These worry worksheets will help you either teach or discuss these things with your class or your child.
This idea is taken from Manisha Taylor’s book; 50 Wellbeing Lessons for the Diverse Primary Classroom. Manisha is the owner of Swaggarlicious, where she provides mental health support to children.
50 Wellbeing Lessons for the Diverse Primary Classroom
by Manisha Taylor
Manisha became passionate about helping to support children’s wellbeing from an early age when her twin brother was diagnosed with Schizophrenia at 18.
Since then, she has used her time and skills to help to provide mental health support to children, and this book offers 50 activities and ideas for parents and teachers to try with their children. The aim to to support kids to develop ways to understand and manage their feelings from an early age.
The book is suitable for ages 8 to 11, and available from Amazon.
What is the focus for the Worry Worksheets?
The learning from this activity is focused on helping children to understand what makes them worried, and to discuss coping strategies for those worries:
- Helping kids to talk about and respond to a number of different emotions / feelings,
- Recognise the signs and symptoms of depression,
- Understand when you need to reach out and ask for support, and
- Be in a position to help and support others that need it.
How to use the anxiety activity for kids
The focus for this is to understand those “big” or negative thoughts and feelings and then help them to manage the worries associated with them.
One of the important things to ask kids is:
What types of things make you worry?
We can then help kids to explore what it is about these things that cause the worry, and how it makes them feel.
We can then explain to the children that worrying about things can cause stress, and that worry can then affect:
- What they are thinking
- How they are feeling, and
- How they behave.
Talking about those feelings can then help to release any negative emotions and enable them to find solutions as well, for themselves.
We have a fabulous activity sheet to go with this. The worry worksheet will help children to understand just what it is that they are worrying about.
Use the sheet – which you can download by clicking on the button below – to get kids to talk about what they are worried about at the moment.
Writing the worries down can help to release negative tension associated with those worries, but will also help them to think about solutions to those problems as well. It can provide additional insights to the worries.
In addition to this, it might mean that they feel less alone in those worries because they realise that others are feeling the same, or similar as well.
Key questions to chat about alongside using the activity are:
- What things make you worry?
- How does worrying make me feel?
- What can you do to manage big feelings?
Don’t forget to check out some of the other activities that we have from Manisha’s book on the site, including managing feeling and emotion, and an intro to mental health too. We also have a mental health series that will complement this activity really well.
We have a whole section on mindfulness that you might like to explore if you have the time. Here are some specific posts that we think that you might like from the site:
Here are some other ideas to help children to understand and cope with their feelings and emotions.
How to help your kids recognise their emotions: Free printable #31DaysOfLearning
A printable to help kids understand what feelings they are having.
Anxiety in kids
Ideas from KiddyCharts to help with kids expressing themselves, and focusing on improving mental health.
Positive writing prompts for kids emotional development #31DaysOfLearning
Writing prompts for children that focus on feelings, and emotional development.
31 Days Of Learning
Find all of our 31 Days of Learning events on one page! Print out our calendar and work your way through each activity! Have fun!
Friendship mindful activity for kids: Friends who lift my spirits most
Simple mindful activities for kids focusing on friends that lift us up.
We do actually have a number of resources specifically focused on anxiety and worries too that are worth taking a look at as well – including another Balloon activity using a book:
Emotions and anxiety resources for kids
Here are some other tools for exploring emotions and anxiety with your kids on the site.
Encouraging kids self-esteem: Be Happy to be You baby bird colouring sheets
How to help kids with their self-esteem; Be happy to be you is a great book for this, and we have some of their colouring sheets to enable you to start the conversation with your kids.
Free Happiness Planner for kids
Happiness can be difficult for some children - so this happiness planner should definitely help.
Free worry tree to help ease your kids fears
If your kids have worries, sometimes being able to visualise them can help. This worry tree can be a great tool for this.
Anxiety in kids: Download these tools today to help your kids to talk
We have some more tools to help tackle anxiety in kids here as well.
5 ways to use reading to help anxiety in kids: Includes FREE friendship bookmarks and book bundle giveaway #TimeToRead
Finally - how can reading and these free bookmarks help with anxiety. Check this out to find out.
It isn’t all about KiddyCharts of course though, there are plenty of other resources on mindfulness to take a look at too:
Mindful activities for kids from other sites
Here are a few more ideas for you about mindful activities that your kids can do today.
50 Mindful Journal Prompts for Teens
Some prompts for the journal that you might now have from Upside Down Books - or just some general journaling ideas for your kids.
Tip To Encourage Mindful Sibling Relationships
Ideas for encouraging mindful sibling relationships - something that we struggle with a little in our family...so perhaps some of you do to?
Inspiring Your Child to Love Themselves
Helping your kids with their self-esteem is a great way to encourage them to be more mindful too. Why not check out this advice to help them?
Thanks so much for coming to see us, and if you like this activity and the site, do consider signing up for our Time to Pee club for more ideas and inspiration for the kids and the classroom!
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Helen
Helen
Helen is a mum to two, social media consultant, and website editor; and this site is (we think) the only Social Enterprise parenting magazine! Since giving up being a business analyst when juggling travel, work and kids proved too complicated, she founded KiddyCharts so she could be with her kids, and use those grey cells at the same time. KiddyCharts has reach of over 1.1million across social and the site. The blog works with big family brands (including travel) to help promote their services, as well as offering free resources to parents of kids under 10. It gives 51%+ profits to Reverence for Life, who fund a number of important initiatives in Africa, including bringing running water and basic equipment to a school in Tanzania. Helen has worked as a digital marketing consultant (IDM qualified) with various organisations, including Channel Mum, Truprint, Talk to Mums, and Micro Scooters. She loves to be creative in the brand campaigns she works on. Get in touch TODAY!