BBC children’s channel CBeebies has launched ‘Your Mindful Garden’ a new activity voiced by actor Stephen Fry within its CBeebies Go Explore app. Developed with a mindfulness consultant, it offer young children three fun activities each day that introduce focus, creativity and calm, teaching valuable techniques to help children de-stress and unwind.

Each of the three activities addresses a different aspect of mindfulness: focus, creative and calm. Whether it’s playing hide and seek with the CBeebies bugs or helping some friendly fish to pick up colourful scales, the focus activities aid concentration, and in turn help to clear and relax the mind. The creative activities include recalling happy memories to grow a feelings flower, or calming the mind by raking patterns in a zen garden.

The final activity of each day is always something calming. From learning to stretch with a new monkey friend to breathing along with a frog, it’s about learning valuable techniques that can help improve children’s wellbeing.

When starting Your Mindful Garden for the first time, children are asked to dig a hole to plant their own mindfulness tree. Completing the three daily activities gets them a surprise for their tree, with a new reward available to make their tree look more exciting every day.

“It was such a pleasure to be involved with a simple, but beautifully designed idea like this,” said Stephen Fry. “I hope and believe that many children will find the game fun, engaging and helpful in their journeys through life.”

Rachel Bardill, executive editor, BBC Children’s added: “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. Any parent knows that learning to focus, be creative and keep calm are important at any age – and growing their mindfulness tree gets children off to a great start with this.”