8 Fun Breathing Exercises for Kids {Printable}

A great collection of breathing exercises for kids available as a set of free, printable activity cards.

Breathing has to be the handiest tool we can gift our child for their managing emotions toolkit, after all your breath goes everywhere with you!

Teaching children to breathe provides them with a simple but effective strategy for slowing down, both mentally and physically, helping them to take notice of how they’re feeling and to relax or calm down in the face of overwhelming emotions.

8 Fun Breathing Exercises for Kids

Today I am sharing eight simple breathing exercises that are perfect for use with kids at home or school. These exercises can be used as part of your calm down plan (though it is obviously important to teach children the technique when they are calm so they can then put it to use in the heat of the moment), as a prior-to-sleep relaxation activity or as a brain break exercise to refocus and re-fresh.

The exercises have been specifically chosen as they are fun and relatable for children of all ages – they’ll particularly enjoy the Elephant and Bumblebee Breathing ones I am sure!

The exercises are available on a series of printable cards so that you can print them out and laminate them.

Be sure to introduce the exercises one at a time so that your child has time to master each one before introducing the next.

You can see the Take 5 Breathing exercise in action here;

I love that this one is so unobtrusive, making it perfect for older children to use discretely wherever they are.

To download and print your breathing exercise cards: Click here to download the cards as a PDF. Download or save the PDF to your own computer. Open the PDF and print. When printing, select “Fit to printable area” (or similar) to ensure the page fits with your printer type and local paper size (these have been created at A4 size). For durability, print onto matte photo paper or lightweight cardstock and laminate. Personal, non commercial use only.

See all of our Managing Emotions Resources here…