About the stories.
Maria Montessori believed our world was full of enough wonder and creativity to eliminate the need for fairy tales, fantasy and talking animals.
Trying to find stories to read to my young daughter that were based on the natural world proved a little challenging. Finding meditation stories that didn’t involve unicorns or riding on rainbows was more difficult.
What I really wanted were meditations that would help calm my daughter for bedtime, and invoke my imagination and love of nature and the world around her. Where she could run as a fox through woodland or imagine what it would be like to be a jaguar prowling the Amazon rainforest; a Roman solider marching across the countryside, or an iron age child going about her day.
In the absence of what I was looking for, I decided to write my own, and if you enjoy the ones here on my blog, then please check out my e-book here for more.
These natural world stories are designed to help children relax with meditation stories inspired by the Montessori Method.
They are suitable for children of all ages, although I have found children aged 4-10 engage most with them.
The stories encourage a feeling of well-being and calm which makes them ideal stories for bedtime.
Each story lets the child step into a different world – to experience living in a different period of history, a different environment, or animal.
There are no talking animals or wild adventures, just a calm journey using research-based stories.
I recommend reading these stories with some relaxing music, and ensure the child is sitting or lying down in a quiet comfortable room. Each story takes around 10-15 minutes to read slowly.
I suggest putting on some gentle background music and reading the stories slowly with frequent 2 second pauses.
Guiding a child into visualisation can take practice, because unlike story-telling, you don’t want to entertain or excite, you want to calm and let the words wash over your child as they drift into the world you are spinning for them. It needs calm, measured tones, spoken softly and clearly.
Children’s guided meditation stories are quite a new addition to the parenting world and can be used as a way to calm down for bedtime or to stop and pause during the day.
Meditation helps children to learn how to physically calm their bodies through deep breathing, and relaxing different parts of their bodies.
It can help them be more in tune with their bodies and identify the physical effects of their mental state.
For example, an upset child manifests their emotions with tears, shouting, shaking, tense muscles and increased heart rate.
Showing a child how they can calm these symptoms through meditation can be a particularly useful exercise in self-control.
There is no conflict, excitement, morals to the story – it is essentially a story where nothing much really happens, but you step into a completely different environment that hopefully relaxes the listener.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you and your children enjoy the stories.
A little bit about the background to the Montessori inspired meditation stories for children…
Imperfectly-Montessori.com 