The BBC has added a new, free section of its Cbeebies Go Explore app for Android, iOS and Amazon Fire devices that helps preschoolers unwind and de-stress.
Your Mindful Garden has different activities aimed around three tenets of mindfulness: focus, creativity and calm. It is narrated by Stephen Fry and rewards children with in-app prizes when they have completed daily tasks.
At first, they plant a mindfulness tree, water it and, once grown, it is ready to be decorated with items won through finishing the exercises.
Focus activities include a gentle game of hide-and-seek with bugs, or picking up colourful scales with a fish.
Creative activities ask children to remember happy memories to add to the petals of a flower, or rake patterns in a zen garden.
Finally, each day’s exercises finish with a calm activity, including stretching exercises with a monkey, or breathing patterns with frog.
Pocket-lint has seen the new app segment in action and can see just how useful it could be for parents with young children, especially at this time of lockdown.
“Giving kids the tools they need to help them prepare for school and beyond is at the heart of Go Explore, and Your Mindful Garden is a really fun way for children to discover mindfulness from an early age,” said BBC Children’s executive editor, Rachel Bardill.
Narrator Fry added: “It was such a pleasure to be involved with a simple, but beautifully designed idea like this. I hope and believe that many children will find the game fun, engaging and helpful in their journeys through life.”
The Go Explore app is available on Apple’s App Store, Google Play and Amazon’s Appstore now. If you have the app already, check to see if the latest update has been downloaded.
Original source: https://www.pocket-lint.com/apps/news/bbc/152109-bbc-helps-preschoolers-with-mindfulness-exercises-in-go-ahead-app-update
