Learning Themes from Books to Teach Yoga to Your Little Ones
What are the benefits?
Children's yoga is a fun, creative way of doing yoga. It includes all aspects of an ordinary yoga class such as breath work, yoga poses, and meditation but in a playful manner.
When children practise yoga, it can help them to create a wonderful sense of self as well as developing teamwork and a feeling of community. Children's yoga can promote positive attitudes whilst developing attention, focus, and concentration. Physically, yoga strengthens muscles and increases flexibility.
What are Kid’s Yoga classes at Aruna Yoga like?
Yoga classes for children began back in February at Aruna Yoga, and it has been such wonderful growth and playtime for the young ones who have been in attendance.
Each week's class is based on a book that has a certain theme. Books are a great way to introduce children to many of the themes of yoga. With books the children become engaged quickly and topics can be discussed easily. Yoga encompasses a wide range of themes so it is easy to relate any book back to yoga and create yoga stories and sequences.
Each class begins with introductions and a moving warm-up game. After our game we move onto some breath work to calm us down. We sometimes use a breathing ball as a calming tool. It helps the children connect with the breath and captivates their attention.
Next we read a story and discuss it and the chosen theme. Following the story we do an asana practice with poses based on characters, or animals or locations from the story. Week on week we add to our list of poses so that we can create our own unique and creative fun yoga flows. We finish the class with a meditation.
What books do we use?
This term the books we focused on were…
Have You Filled a Bucket Today?
written by Carol McCloud
Theme: Respect
This book was used to establish the rules for our class and to promote doing good deeds for ourselves and others.
Little Red Riding Hood
Theme: Bravery
This book was a student's suggestion, and was used to look at how we should listen to our gut and be brave. We also used this book to focus on affirmations.
Click, Clack, Moo Cows That Type
written by Doreen Cronin
Theme: Teamwork
We used this book to look at teamwork and we discussed how we are stronger when we work together.
Duffy's Lucky Escape
written by Ellie Jackson and Liz Oldmeadow
Theme: Caring For The Environment
With this book we discussed pollution and how we can take care of the environment.
Brian The Smelly Bear
written by Mark Chambers
Theme: Being happy with who we are
From this book we had a discussion on how we are enough and we also used this book to focus on breath work.
The Lamb Who Came For Dinner
written by Steve Smallman
Theme: Friendship
We discussed friendship and what it means to be a good friend and why good friends are important to have. We created a beautiful flow sequence based on all the asanas we had learned up to now.
The feedback from the children was great, they learned many skills over their six weeks and really enjoyed themselves. Classes resumed this week on Wednesday, May 8th, for another four weeks. If you feel as though you have a fledgling yogi in your house and you would like them to join us, just get in touch and we will see them on the mat.
LAURA MCGREGAR
I am a Yoga Therapy Ireland (YTI) trained teacher. I have over 15 years' experience of doing yoga. I began teaching yoga to children and then trained as a Hatha Yoga teacher in 2015.