Take a Deep Breath: Ideas for You and Your Students to Relax and Enjoy Online Classes

By Allison Lewis

We’re all overwhelmed right now. We're in the middle of a global pandemic, and many of us have been thrown into online teaching without any preparation. And it’s not just us teachers. Many of our students feel just as stressed out as we do right now, if not more so.

I’ve been trying to find some ways to find peace and calm during this crisis, both for me and for my students. These are a few of the ideas I’ve been trying out in my online classes:

Journaling or Discussion Prompts

As language teachers, we’re always looking for ways to get our students writing about topics that are meaningful for them, and right now is probably one of the best times for us to encourage our students to use journaling to express their thoughts and feelings. Giving students time to write freely about anything they want to can be helpful. I also sometimes like to give writing prompts that intentionally focus on positive topics as an attempt to counterbalance all the negativity we’re seeing in the news right now. Some topic ideas:

What has made you feel happy in the last few days?
What are your favorite activities to do at home?
What’s the best thing about spending a lot of time at home? What’s the worst thing?
What’s your favorite room in your house and why?
What new things have you learned about yourself or your family members now that you’re spending a lot of time at home?

Lauren S. Brown’s article on MiddleWeb.com also gives good suggestions for how to encourage students to write as a way of documenting history in the making.
Of course, all of these prompts could also be used as discussion prompts in class or for student-recorded videos on a platform like Flipgrid.

Move Around

As I’ve been sitting through many online meetings and webinars recently, I’m starting to become familiar with that feeling of tiredness that sets in when sitting and staring at a head talking on a screen for too long. And if I feel that way, I’m sure that many of my students feel it, too.

If you’re meeting synchronously with your students through video, you can use physical movement as a way to break up the class time and to help your students (and you!) concentrate better. It could be as simple as telling the students to take a short stretch break, and you can all stand up and move around a bit. Or here are some other ways to incorporate movement:

TPR (Total Physical Response): Give students TPR commands, such as: Stand up. Sit down. Raise your arms. Touch your left foot. Point to your right knee. After you give some commands, you can have students take turns giving their classmates commands. You could also turn it into a game of Simon Says.
Balance: The students all stand up and choose an object they have nearby (like a pencil), and you give them directions for where on their body they should balance it. For example: Balance it on your head. Balance it on your right arm. Balance it on your back. Balance it on your left foot.
Scavenger Hunt Game: I got this idea from Anne Marie Chase, a teacher in Nevada. In the game, you call out the name of a type of object (for example: a fruit, a stuffed animal, something green, a water bottle, a dollar bill, etc.). The students go find that object in their home and bring it back to show it on their screen while saying “I got it!” Whoever finds the object first is the winner of that round. This can also lead to some fun conversations in class about the objects that students find.
Mirror: In this activity, the teacher does some type of movement, and the students mimic that exact movement. You can raise your hands, jump around, whatever. After a while, a student can take over as the leader, and everyone else has to follow what they do.
Write in the Air: This idea comes from Annabelle Allen, a Spanish teacher in Louisiana. Tell students to stand up (they don’t really need to stand up, but you can tell them to so they get more movement!) and use their finger to “write” a word in the air. They could write their own name, write the numbers 1 through 10, or you could say a word that they need to write. You could also call on individual students to think of a word for their classmates to write. After a while, you could switch things up by having them “write” using their non-dominant hand or their leg.

Breathing Exercises and Guided Meditations

Breathing exercises and guided meditations can help students calm down and de-stress. Last week, I led my students in an exercise to focus on their breathing and relax their muscles. It also gives students good language input—my students learned some new words like inhale and exhale. You can find lots of guided meditation videos on YouTube to give you ideas for how to do it. For mine, I led my students through inhaling for four seconds through their nose and then exhaling for four seconds through their mouth. We repeated that several times. Then I told them to go through each part of their body and to first tighten their muscles and then relax them for each body part (arms, hands, stomach, legs, feet, toes). We finished by doing the inhaling and exhaling a few more times.

Don’t forget to go easy on yourself during this time of crisis. The world is in an emergency state, and teaching online is the stopgap measure to try to keep things running in a semi-normal way. Try to learn and experiment with your teaching in the ways you can, but don’t put too much pressure on yourself to be an amazing teacher right now. Focus on staying healthy, both physically and mentally.

Allison Lewis teaches adult ESL in Chicago at Richard J. Daley College and Pui Tak Center. She received her M.A. in Linguistics/TESOL from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was a contributing author for the Voces Digital ESL textbook series and is the author of a graded reader for ESL students titled My Fake Boyfriend.


Take a Deep Breath: Ideas for You and Your Students to Relax and Enjoy Online Classes By Allison Lewis We’re all overwhelmed right now. We're in the middle of a global pandemic, and many of us have been thrown into online teaching without any preparation. And it’s not just us teachers. Many of our students feel just as stressed out as we do right now, if not more so. I’ve been trying to find some ways to find peace and calm during this crisis, both for me and for my students. These are a few of the ideas I’ve been trying out in my online classes: Journaling or Discussion Prompts As language teachers, we’re always looking for ways to get our students writing about topics that are meaningful for them, and right now is probably one of the best times for us to encourage our students to use journaling to express their thoughts and feelings. Giving students time to write freely about anything they want to can be helpful. I also sometimes like to give writing prompts that intentionally focus on positive topics as an attempt to counterbalance all the negativity we’re seeing in the news right now. Some topic ideas: What has made you feel happy in the last few days? What are your favorite activities to do at home? What’s the best thing about spending a lot of time at home? What’s the worst thing? What’s your favorite room in your house and why? What new things have you learned about yourself or your family members now that you’re spending a lot of time at home? Lauren S. Brown’s article on MiddleWeb.com also gives good suggestions for how to encourage students to write as a way of documenting history in the making. Of course, all of these prompts could also be used as discussion prompts in class or for student-recorded videos on a platform like Flipgrid. Move Around As I’ve been sitting through many online meetings and webinars recently, I’m starting to become familiar with that feeling of tiredness that sets in when sitting and staring at a head talking on a screen for too long. And if I feel that way, I’m sure that many of my students feel it, too. If you’re meeting synchronously with your students through video, you can use physical movement as a way to break up the class time and to help your students (and you!) concentrate better. It could be as simple as telling the students to take a short stretch break, and you can all stand up and move around a bit. Or here are some other ways to incorporate movement: TPR (Total Physical Response): Give students TPR commands, such as: Stand up. Sit down. Raise your arms. Touch your left foot. Point to your right knee. After you give some commands, you can have students take turns giving their classmates commands. You could also turn it into a game of Simon Says. Balance: The students all stand up and choose an object they have nearby (like a pencil), and you give them directions for where on their body they should balance it. For example: Balance it on your head. Balance it on your right arm. Balance it on your back. Balance it on your left foot. Scavenger Hunt Game: I got this idea from Anne Marie Chase, a teacher in Nevada. In the game, you call out the name of a type of object (for example: a fruit, a stuffed animal, something green, a water bottle, a dollar bill, etc.). The students go find that object in their home and bring it back to show it on their screen while saying “I got it!” Whoever finds the object first is the winner of that round. This can also lead to some fun conversations in class about the objects that students find. Mirror: In this activity, the teacher does some type of movement, and the students mimic that exact movement. You can raise your hands, jump around, whatever. After a while, a student can take over as the leader, and everyone else has to follow what they do. Write in the Air: This idea comes from Annabelle Allen, a Spanish teacher in Louisiana. Tell students to stand up (they don’t really need to stand up, but you can tell them to so they get more movement!) and use their finger to “write” a word in the air. They could write their own name, write the numbers 1 through 10, or you could say a word that they need to write. You could also call on individual students to think of a word for their classmates to write. After a while, you could switch things up by having them “write” using their non-dominant hand or their leg. Breathing Exercises and Guided Meditations Breathing exercises and guided meditations can help students calm down and de-stress. Last week, I led my students in an exercise to focus on their breathing and relax their muscles. It also gives students good language input—my students learned some new words like inhale and exhale. You can find lots of guided meditation videos on YouTube to give you ideas for how to do it. For mine, I led my students through inhaling for four seconds through their nose and then exhaling for four seconds through their mouth. We repeated that several times. Then I told them to go through each part of their body and to first tighten their muscles and then relax them for each body part (arms, hands, stomach, legs, feet, toes). We finished by doing the inhaling and exhaling a few more times. Don’t forget to go easy on yourself during this time of crisis. The world is in an emergency state, and teaching online is the stopgap measure to try to keep things running in a semi-normal way. Try to learn and experiment with your teaching in the ways you can, but don’t put too much pressure on yourself to be an amazing teacher right now. Focus on staying healthy, both physically and mentally. Allison Lewis teaches adult ESL in Chicago at Richard J. Daley College and Pui Tak Center. She received her M.A. in Linguistics/TESOL from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was a contributing author for the Voces Digital ESL textbook series and is the author of a graded reader for ESL students titled My Fake Boyfriend.
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