Building healthy New Year habits with your students

Amy Malloy
Amy Malloy
Students sat outside on grass studying and smiling
Reading time: 3 minutes

Balancing mindfulness and planning ahead

Here we find ourselves already in a new year. I wonder if, like me, many of you might be wondering how that has happened. January is a time of year traditionally associated with analyzing the past and making resolutions for the future.

In the classroom this might also involve looking forward to assessments and exams at the end of the school year. Maybe you’ve made New Year’s resolutions that have already fallen by the wayside.

The focus of this blog is learning how to stay in the present moment. So let's take a practical look at how to manage this time of year with your students and with ourselves as teachers (and humans), while also effectively planning ahead for the future.

Building healthy New Year habits with your students
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1. Mindfulness of daily habits

Mindfulness can be a broader concept than just focusing on the breath. We can also extend awareness to our daily habits and look at what is making us feel good and what is draining us. This helps us ensure our daily routine is actively supporting our mental health.

Here’s what you can do to help your students be more mindful of their daily habits.

  1. Invite your students to make two lists: one list of everything they do every day and another list of things that make them feel happy or relaxed. This can be a nice activity to try in English if you’d like to work on daily routine vocabulary and likes/dislikes.
  2. Ask them to see how many of the activities they named in their happy lists are also on their everyday lists.
  3. Then ask them to see if they can find a time in their schedules to include one of their happy list activities on a regular basis. For example, they could add listening to their favourite song on their way to school to their everyday list.

This activity encourages children to be more understanding of what makes them feel happy or less happy on a daily basis. In this way, we gently teach them to be more aware of their emotions and how to take an active role in supporting their own mental health and self-care. Ultimately, we teach them that the choices we make day-to-day are as important as a resolution for the rest of the year.

As they learn more mindfulness activities in school, these might even start to appear on their everyday lists too. This will protect their minds against everyday stress and assessment pressure.

2. Planting an intention seed

New Year’s resolutions seem to play a large role in society, and it is interesting to notice how guilty we feel if we don’t stick to them.

We traditionally make resolutions at the start of a new year, but this is completely arbitrary - and it hasn’t always been this way. In fact, the concept of setting an intention for the new year dates back to at least 4000BC. Back then, these resolutions were traditionally made in March, . But when Julius Caesar made the Roman calendar, he decided that each year would begin in January.

The Romans felt it was more appropriate because the Roman god Janus represented new beginnings, endings, gateways and transitions. It’s strange to think this ancient decision now affects how we run and organize our lives and our personal energy all over the world.

January is actually a time when nature is still in hibernation, with trees bare and seeds still under the ground (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least). This can make it feel difficult to commit to fresh starts and, for some, feel overwhelming to look ahead.

So instead of resolutions, try inviting your students to simply set an intention of what they’d like to feel or achieve over the course of the year. And rather than pushing for it or expecting it to happen straight away, invite them to treat it like a seed in a pot of soil which they are watering each day with one little step at a time.

This might be a little bit of revision for a test every day, for example, or tidying their room once a week so it feels nice to play and do homework in.

3. Mindful walking

A lovely way to get your students to connect with nature’s calendar is to take them outside for a mindfulness walk. You could link it in with a class plan to introduce nature or town vocabulary, or organize it during lunch or break time for multiple classes together.

  1. Take students outside*. Invite them to stand quietly looking at the ground.
  2. Invite them to notice the contact of their feet with the ground. Tell them to start walking slowly, noticing the movement of each foot as it leaves and then meets the ground again.
  3. Once they are in a gentle walking rhythm, invite them to start looking around them, noticing the world around them. They should keep a gentle focus on the rhythm of their feet moving along the floor.
  4. Once back in the classroom, invite them to spend five minutes writing down or talking about what they noticed on their walk (in English)

*If outside simply isn’t an option for your school, you can try a mindful walk through the corridors.

This can be a really pleasant way to encourage students (and yourself) to notice what is going on around them in nature and to step outside of the timetable set for them as part of the school system. It helps their focus and perspective, reducing stress and reminding them how far they have progressed.

Staying present and planning ahead

I often have mindfulness students asking me how they can stay present while also effectively planning ahead. Hopefully, these three simple ideas demonstrate how we can actively use our focus on the present moment to improve and pace our future planning for exams and deadlines.

By trusting in the process of calmly planting little seeds of intention and taking little steps to grow them, we can achieve just as much, if not more, than thinking six months into the future and panicking that we haven’t yet achieved what we want to have done by then. Good luck.

Read our posts 'tips for student wellbeing at back to school time' and 'Does mindfulness really work? Can it help your students?'.

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    It will be even more challenging if you're a self-learner as you do not have a teacher looking over you and steering your learning. But it’s helpful to learn from the teaching world and pick up teacher tips that you can apply to your own studies and techniques.

    Why are learning new words so challenging?

    Students learning new words in English generally progress steadily up until the pre-intermediate and intermediate levels. But after that, they start to struggle.

    This is because there’s a big difference between the volume of the vocabulary that intermediate students and upper-intermediate students need to know.

    • Intermediate (B1/B2 level) students need to know about 2,500 words
    • upper-intermediate (B2/C1 level) students need to know about 7,500-9,000 words.

    That’s a big jump in numbers. But the real challenge is that those 5,000+ new words are not very frequent. Consequently, students don’t encounter them very often, making it difficult to recall them and leap from one level to the next.

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    2. Provide memorable first encounters:You never get a second chance to make a first impression. So, ensure your student's first encounter with a new word is as memorable as possible.
    3. Teach effective word-learning strategies:Provide your students with valuable tools, tactics and resources so that they can learn new words outside the classroom, too.
    4. Organize repeat encounters:Vocabulary works on a “use it or lose it” basis, so ensure your students encounter the vocabulary you want them to learn repeatedly.

    How to teach effective word-learning strategies

    There are three steps to teach students how to learn new words effectively:

    1. Help learners maximize their exposure to English and find opportunities to use English outside the classroom

    Thanks to the internet and technology, there are many ways that students can engage with the English language outside the classroom.

    However, simple exposure to a new language is not enough – it takes much longer and is less effective than active learning. When students do something with the language they’re exposed to; it is far more memorable.

    That’s why it’s crucial for teachers to help their students seek out English in their own time and use the language, turning passive exposure into active learning.

    • Encourage students to read, listen and view things that they’re interested in or passionate about in English. For example, introduce them to new blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, or TV series that fit their interests – since personalization leads to more effective learning.
    • Help students find ways to use English in different ways. For example, they can start a learning diary, make to-do lists in English, write social media posts, and create word cards to practice their writing. For speaking, they can record voice memos or video stories, take part in Zoom discussions, or participate in speaking projects and live classes.

    2. Provide ways for students to discover the meaning of new words

    It’s crucial to help students improve their guesswork. Instead of asking online translators to translate every time they encounter a new word, they should be able to guess the meaning of new vocabulary differently.

    • One approach is to look at the morphology of words and consider word families. For example, you can ask your students to brainstorm words with a common root. Or, you can have them identify and practice common suffixes.
    • Explore “true friends” or words that are similar in English and your student's native language.
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    Lastly, it’s important to teach students memory tricks or mnemonics so they can retain the new words they encounter.