The Stress Management and Healthy Coping Workbook is a free, printable mental health resource designed to help upper primary students (ages 9–12) understand stress, recognise its effects, and develop healthy coping skills. With clear explanations, interactive lessons, and creative activities, this workbook supports social-emotional learning (SEL) while building resilience, emotional awareness, and mental wellbeing in children.
Using real-life examples, visual tools, and hands-on tasks, the workbook guides students through how stress affects the body, thoughts, emotions, and behaviour—and offers practical strategies for managing these experiences in healthy ways.
Topics covered include:
What is stress and how does it affect us?
The fight–flight–freeze response explained for children
Internal vs external stress – what we can and cannot control
Healthy vs unhealthy coping strategies
The link between emotions and physical symptoms
Includes 15 engaging activities such as:
Stress experiments and journaling prompts
Fight-flight-freeze comic strip task
“Stress Bucket” visualisation activity
Mood tracking and emotion wheels
Charades and drawing games to express feelings
Stress tests and daily affirmation exercises
Building a “stress structure” using pipe cleaners and weights
Progress chart to set personal wellbeing goals
Perfect for use in:
Primary school classrooms, PSHE and mental health lessons
Group work, calm corners, and nurture or SEND settings
Therapeutic sessions with social workers, TAs or youth workers
Home use with parents and carers supporting anxious children
Foster care, early help and resilience-building programmes
This KidSMART stress education workbook for kids not only improves understanding of stress but also empowers children to identify their feelings, use healthy coping tools, and build a strong emotional foundation to thrive at school and beyond.
