Laughter is an international language. Pedaling a bike is excellent exercise. Put these two together and travel to the land of ha ha he he health.

Instructions

1. Sit in a chair or lie on your back.
2. Bend your arms and legs like you are riding bicycles in the air.
3. Pedal forward: laugh.
4. Pedal backward: laugh.

It might be hard to really laugh at first, but once you get started, you won’t be able to stop. Have fun and be silly with this pose!

Notes for Parents and Teachers

Laughing is a great way to lighten up an intense mood or situation. If tension is mounting and bad moods are escalating designate a laughing break. Remind yourself and your children to look at the lighter side of things.

Activity Ideas for Home or Classroom

Math Medley/Awesome Anatomy
Count out loud or use a timer to see how long each person can maintain their pedal laughing. Time pulses and heart rates too. Make a chart or graph to look at the comparisons.

Body Benefits
Laughter lowers blood pressure, reduces stress hormones, increases muscle flexion, boosts immune function and produces a natural body chemical called endorphins, which make you naturally feel good.

Musical Musings
Form a Pedal Laughing chorus or choir. High tone laughters are sopranos, low tone ones are bass. Medium low laughers are tenors and medium high are altos. Take turns being the conductors to bring in different voices, get louder or faster and to stop.

Nutrition Tip
Have fun with your food! Many of us have a “love-hate” relationship with food.  It is a necessary part of our daily lives but is often confusing, time consuming and takes us away from other activities we would rather be doing.  This week bring laughter into your life with the Pedal Pose and bring that laughter and feeling of play into the kitchen.

• Have family members create their favorite meal – participate in the menu planning, preparation and cleaning.
• Play music in the kitchen.
• Keep fresh flowers in your eating area.
• Practice cooking different types of foods – get the children involved in cooking new foods and new recipes.
• Connect Food to cultures or countries your children may be studying in school.
• Have family members select a vegetable or fruit of the week – something you have never tried – they find a recipe(s) and help with the preparation.
• Try to sit down and eat as a family at least a couple of times a week – no TV, no phones, no computers.  Enjoy a fun relaxed meal together.

A camel has two humps, and a dromedary, a type of camel, has only one. Both store fat (not water) in their humps.

Instructions

1. Kneel on the floor with your legs and knees hip width apart.
2. Press the tops of your feet into the floor, push the thighs forward, bring the hands to the lower back with fingers pointing upward and lift the chest.
3. Breathe evenly in and out, as you extend the ribcage and broaden your chest.
4. Continue to lift your chest with each breath as you curl your toes forward and bring your hands to the heels to imitate the camel’s hump. The head can come back (as shown) or tuck into the chest.
5. Delight in the dromedary for ten seconds.
6. Rest in the child’s pose after each of these backbends.
7. Repeat.

Increase the times and repetitions as your spine and chest continue to become more flexible.

Note to Parents and Teachers

This pose strengthens the back and kidneys. Because of its chest opening ability, it can increase lung capacity and can be especially beneficial for children with asthma. It also helps the posture of those with drooping shoulders and rounded backs.

Activity Ideas for Home and Classroom

Ecological Echoes
Camels and dromedaries avoid trotting and galloping whenever possible in order to save water and energy. They can survive for months without water and can drink up to 35 gallons of water at a time.

Awesome Anatomy
Lift your chest, by letting the arch of your spine and your back ribs support you. Imagine your back ribs as lounge chairs for your lungs. Let your lungs expand and rest on these slatted chairs. Feel how much your lungs can expand when you breathe fully.

The lungs are light and spongy and are filled with millions of air channels which provide an enormous surface to absorb oxygen. If your lungs were flattened out, they’d make a slippery surface the size of a tennis court!*

* The Children’s Atlas of the Human Body by Richard Walker, The Millbrook Press Inc., 1994, Pg. 24

Flamingos are born with soft gray feathers. Around their 3rd birthday, their color turns flaming pink or orange. That’s quite a birthday present! Their feathers are orange and pink because their diet of algae and shrimp are high in carotenoids. Carotenoids are what give carrots their orange hue and make cooked shrimp pink…like a flamingo’s feathers! If the flamingos stopped eating this type of diet, its feathers would eventually go back to being white.

Instructions

1. Begin in mountain pose.
2. Spread your arms open like graceful wings as your left leg extends straight back.
3. Bend forward at the hip hinge.
4. Establish your balance little by little as you adjust your arms and back leg.
5. Clear your mind and fix your attention on your breath, body and focusing friend. Notice when your thoughts are scattered, your pose is unsteady too.
6. If you feel like flying, gently flap your wings Repeat with the opposite leg.

Do both sides 2-3 times.

Activity Ideas for Home or Classroom

Ecological Echoes
A flamingo flies with its head and neck stretched out in front. And, unlike other feathered friends, flamingos bend and stretch their legs behind them when balancing. Can you feel the difference between stork and flamingo?

Math Medley
Flamingo wings are about 60 inches from tip to tip. How many feet is that? Hint: 1 foot = 12 inches What is your wingspan? Measure from fingertip to fingertip.

Body Benefits
Flamingo legs might look scrawny and spindly, but they’re not. This pose strengthens, shapes and tones the legs. The upper body may then experience a sense of feathery lightness. Praise your child as you see them become more graceful, poised and balanced.

Stretch your whole body – arms, legs, toes, spine and fingers. Become gooey and sweet as you fold forward and make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Instructions

1. Begin in L is for Left. Reach up and grab the peanut butter and jelly jars that are floating through the air. Can you reach them?
2. Rub PB & J all over your hands and smear it between your toes. Fold forward and make a sandwich by pressing your upper body towards your lower body.
3. Spread it all over your legs and on your belly as you learn the names of your bones and muscles.
4. Wash your face and hair in peanut butter and jelly.

Activity Ideas for Home or Classroom

Awesome Anatomy
Teach your children to learn the parts of their body with age appropriate anatomical names and words.

Body Benefits
When you fold forward at the hip hinge, like in this pose, it is called a forward bend. Forward bends stretch the hamstrings, calves and all the muscles of the back. In time, you will become more flexible and be able to lengthen your legs and spine more.

Math Medley
The average child eats 1,500 PB&J sandwiches before he or she graduates high school. How many is that each day, week, month, year, decade, century?

Bridge of Diamonds
In other countries, peanut butter is not as popular as it is in the US and Canada. In Australia, they eat Vegemite, in Italy, they eat pizza. In Mexico, tacos. Black beans and rice in Brazil. Chicken rice in Singapore. Pho in Vietnam.

Nutrition Tip
Since many of you just love PB&J, take it up a few notches with these healthy tips.

• Start with a multi grain, whole grain bread. One fun way to get your kids involved is making bread. The easiest and fastest way is to use a bread machine. Children love to put in the ingredients before they go the bed at night, set the timer and wake up to the smell and taste of delicious, homemade bread. Yummy. And they are so proud of themselves too.
• Try using a jar of natural or organic peanut butter. Try to avoid the peanut butters with partially hydrogenated oils – they have a long shelf life and lots of flavor but the trans fat are unhealthy and do not digest well in our bodies. Did you know you can make butter from all kinds of nuts: almonds, cashews, sesame, pistachio. Try it out.
• How about bananas instead of Jelly? What else would taste yummy with peanut butter? Apples? Honey? Avocado? Experiment and explore. Look for jams made from the whole fruit. These are naturally sweetened without the addition of high fructose corn syrup and other added sugars.

Dolphins are mammals just like you. They have lungs and they breathe air, even though they live in the water! They also have their own language. Can you speak Dolphinese?

Instructions

1. Begin on all fours. Lower your elbows to the floor. Make sure that your knees are under your hips.
2. Clasp your elbows with the opposite fingers to keep proper spacing. Shoulders remain aligned over the elbows.
3. Move your lower arms forward, interlace your fingers, and make a triangle. Your hands are one point, and your elbows are the other two points. Breathe as your spine lengthens, your tailbone lifts up, your legs stretch.
4. Press your heels towards the floor.
5. Move your body forward so your chin touches down in front of your fingers.
6. Breathe out and lift out of the water.

Activity Ideas for Home or Classroom

Body Benefits
This pose builds agility and flexibility in the joints of the shoulders, hips, knees and ankles as well as strengthens the muscles of the arms, legs and belly. Do the dolphin and build your upper body strength.

Math Medley
As you already know, dolphins are mammals just like us and have lungs like we do. Although they need to surface for a gulp of air about every five minutes or so. Do the math: If they were to swim for one hour, how many times would they come up for air? For 5 hours? For a whole day? Month?

Musical Musings
Dolphins squeeze air back and forth between breath sacs under their blowholes. Can you make clicking sounds and patterns like a dolphin singing his watery melodies?

Nutrition Tip
Did you know there are vegetables in the sea? Guess what they’re called? Yup, you guessed it — SEA VEGETABLES! They contain many vitamins and minerals. They have more nutrients than any other food on the planet!  These funny sea vegetables are very different then most of the foods we are used to. Sea vegetables balance our blood and can help us to calm down when are bodies are over-active and excited.

These sea vegetables have fun and exotic names like:

• Kombu
• Wakame
• Kelp
• Agar Agar
• Hijiki

Can you say those? Now you’re speaking some Japanese.

Here are some ways to get cooking with the sea:

• Add wakame to spaghetti sauce.
• Use kelp or dolce instead of salt.
• Bake with agar agar (instead of gelatin) as a base for custards, puddings and jello. It will thicken sauces too. (It’s also a vegetarian substitute for gelatin.)
• Cook kombu with rice and beans to up the minerals in your body.

Experiment, look for recipes and talk about this new and interesting addition to menu!