Blog Archives

Swan

by YogaKids Team

You are a graceful swan, sailing from side to side as you move smoothly through the water.

Instructions

Begin All-Fours pose.
Bend your lower legs, point your toes to the sky and glide your body forward.
Lift your chest and lengthen your graceful neck.
Drop your shoulders and keep your arms strong. Y
Breathe in and out.

Activity Ideas for Home or Classroom

Affirmations
Play with the following affirmations while doing this pose:

“I am graceful as a swan.”
“I sail with ease through hard times.”
“I am gentle and beautiful.”

Musical Musings
Play Tchaikowvsky’s Swan Lake while moving around as swans.

Body Benefits
Practicing Swan pose keeps the spine and lower back flexible. and increases upper body strength. It can help to lengthen the neck, improve posture and broaden the chest to help counteract slumping.

The Opposite of Mindfulness

by Ann Huber

When the Sandy Hook tragedy happened, I was more than a little distraught. At the time, my kids were 4 and 7 years old. My friend — having seen all my Facebook posts on the matter — called to ask if I really thought my kids were going to be in a school shooting. She wasn’t being cold-hearted, just realistic. I assured her that I knew the odds were slim.

Unfortunately, the odds seem a lot less astronomical now than they did then. Still pretty unlikely, but definitely in the realm of possibility. By the way, it was just the realm of possibility that had me so distraught in the first place. I mean… how could this happen? And how does it continue to happen?

I’d venture to say that events like Sandy Hook don’t just HAPPEN. Violence needs a breeding ground, one void of mindfulness. One actually nourished by what seems to be the opposite of mindfulness. Can that be a thing we talk about? In addition to gun control, individual rights, mental illness, violent media etc… can we talk about the opposite of mindfulness as a possible root cause?

What would that be called? This opposite? A quick search on antonyms brought up: apathy, carelessness, disregard, idleness, ignorance, indifference, negligence, thoughtlessness… to name a few. While we don’t have a single word, the opposite of mindfulness is most certainly a lot of unpleasantness. And I imagine — when mixed in with a few other ingredients (fear and shame) — the end results are aggression and violence.

So what can we do? Nothing is going to eradicate violence completely — but can we do something? Can we nourish the soil with something better? Empower children with the tools to live happy and healthy lives? After all, kids (and adults) that feel good about themselves — ones that are mindful of themselves, others and the larger world around them — are not even going to bully others… much less pull a gun on them. Why? Because you can’t be centered and angry at the same time.

Learn more about the YogaKids program here.

Balloon Breath

by YogaKids Team

Instructions

Close your eyes and picture a balloon in your lap slowly growing bigger, as you breathe in through your nose.
Picture it getting smaller as you breathe out through your nose and release all your tummy air. Breathe in, fill your balloon, and let your arms rise away from you to encircle the balloon.
Now gently press your balloon flat, letting your arms come back in towards your belly.
Repeat several times.

Note for Parents

This pose can be done at a desk or sitting on the floor.

Activity Ideas for Home or Classroom

Awesome Anatomy
Give each student a balloon to inflate. Let them blow it up and then let the air flow back out, observing the shape of the balloon. The balloon shrinks because of the elasticity of the material. Students can learn that their lungs are also elastic: they inflate with an inhalation and will deflate on their own, with no muscular effort. Students will also be interested to learn that the lungs do not have muscles at all; we inhale by expanding the ribs and/or flattening the diaphragm muscle. The lungs are held against the inside of the chest wall by a vacuum.

Body Benefits

Breathing deeply and fully with Balloon Breath brings more oxygen into our blood stream to make us more alert and focused.

Math Medley

Play with a 2 to 1 ratio as a pattern to increase your breathing capacity. For example, breathe in for 2 counts, and breathe out for 4 counts. Gradually let your breath and number power expand.

Frog

by YogaKids Team

This pose can be done anywhere, at any time. Squat down on your heels, like a frog – place your palms flat on the ground. We’re also going to make frog noises. Do you know that some frogs expand their necks to amazing sizes when they breathe in and out? Imagine your chest is a frog’s throat and expand it out as big as you can….ribbbiiiit!

Instructions

Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart.
Pivot your feet outward, so that your toes are wider than your heels.
Bend your knees until you are squatting. Try to keep your heels on the floor.
Bring your palms together at your heart.
Stay here for several breaths.
Be sure to ribbit like a frog!

Activity Ideas for Home and Classroom

Ecological Echoes
Did you know? Frogs don’t drink water — they absorb it through their skin. They also completely shed their skin about once a week. After it pulls off the old, dead skin, the frog usually eats it.

Body Benefits
This pose opens your hips and stretches your groin.

Affirmations
Try these affirmations as you do the pose: “I feel grounded” and “I feel balanced and strong.”

Bridge

by YogaKids Team

Instructions

Lie on your back, arms at your sides.
Bend both knees and place your feet flat on the floor hip-width apart.
Press the feet into the floor, inhale and lift the hips up, rolling the spine off the floor.
Press down into the arms and shoulders to lift the chest up.
Breathe and hold for several breaths.

Activity Ideas for Home or Classroom

Ecological Echoes
There are many different bridge types. And the type that is build depends on the the terrain underneath. The first bridges were made of logs — but not can be made of oncrete, metal, and other materials. Which bridges have you visited?

Math Medley
The world’s longest bridge is the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge in China. The bridge, which opened in June 2011, spans 102.4 miles. How many feet is that?

Acceptance and Letting Go

by Anna Ranish

“Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.”

– Eckhart Tolle

Life with bipolar disorder combined with ADHD is an interesting adventure—but teaching kids yoga has made it a much more bearable one. I realized that I have a knack for teaching at my very first career as a computer programmer. Instead of enjoying writing and debugging code like most programmers, my favorite work time activities were writing and correcting documentation, and helping the new people understand our system. (Ask any programmer what they think about writing documentation. You rarely will hear enthusiasm at the prospect!)

Following that career, I took a 5-year vacation from working life to have my first child and to be introduced to my new life companion: bipolar disorder. After a month of getting to know it at a psychiatrist hospital in New York City, I decided I decided I didn’t much like my new companion. (They say it takes about ten years for bipolar patients to accept their diagnoses – and this rule held true for me.)

The next ten years were a huge emotional roller coaster. I was on and off my medications, and I was on and off believing that I must live my life with bipolar disorder. During those ten years, I was accumulating all sorts of fears and phobias. Many of them found their niche in my back, causing me to develop debilitating backaches.

The next four years seemed like an unending sequence of acceptance and letting goes as I began regularly practicing hot Bikram yoga. I accepted the bipolar disorder, and miraculously the back pain began to subside. During this time, I also let go of my former jobs. My past environments felt toxic – but the desire to teach was still strong within me. That’s when I discovered YogaKids.

The YogaKids program carried all he answers to my doubts. As I was discovering the principles of YogaKids during my six months of training, I became more and more thrilled. It incorporated many of the things that I believed in when I was helping children back in my academic jobs. I learned so many new techniques and almost a whole new way of teaching.

I feel the process of accepting and letting go is still just starting for me. For 37 years, I lived a life ruled by disorders. Now I’m on the path towards a new way of life ruled by me. And I attribute this major shift in my life to yoga…. both as a lifelong yoga student and as a newly certified YogaKids instructor.

ASL Valentines Day Card

by YogaKids Team

Valentines Day falls on February 14 every year. The real history of Valentine’s Day is a little confusing. It began as two different pagan festivals that were later adopted by the Catholic Church as an entirely separate festival honoring two men ‘(both named Valentine, who were executed on Feb. 14 in two different years, by a Roman emperor) who were later declared Saints. So while the story of Valentine’s Day has some dark and unclear origins, today we exclusively celebrate the holiday to spread love and fond wishes (and little candy hearts).

The people of Earth speak a multitude of languages. What languages do you speak? How do you say “I love you” in your native language? Do you know how to say “I love you” in any other languages?

Here is how we say “I love you” in some of the world’s most widely spoken languages. You can look up videos online for instructions on how to pronounce these words. Can you match the languages to the countries whose people speak them? Can you find those countries on a world map?

Chinese: Wǒ ài nǐ

Spanish: Te amo.

Arabic: ‘Ahabak

French: Je t’aime

Japanese: Watashi wa, anata o aishiteimasu

Hindi: Main tumase pyaar karata hoon

Russian: Ya lyublyu tebya

Portuguese: Eu te amo

Bengali: Āmi tōmāẏa bhālōbāsi

Javanese: Kangen

Today, we are going to make a Valentine’s Day card in ASL – which is short for American Sign Language. ASL is the beautiful language that people who are hearing impaired “speak” with their hands.

Materials & Instructions

Colored paper – one sheet in your flesh color and one in the color you want for the card’s background.
Glue
Markers, crayons, pens, etc.
Glitter or other decorations (optional)

Trace your hand and a little bit of your wrist on a piece of paper the color of your skin.
Cut it out.
Fold the other colored piece of paper in half to make the card.
Glue just the palm of the hand and the wrist section to the card, leaving the fingers loose.
Now, place a tiny dot of glue on the tip of the pointer finger, pinkie, and thumb, and glue those fingers in place.
Fold (don’t crease) the middle two fingers down to the palm of the hand and, using a small drop of glue on the very tip of each of those fingers, attach them in place to look like the picture.
Now add your own message of love to the inside and outside of the card and give it to a person you love!

Happy Valentines Day!

Rib-Splitting Seated Triangle

by YogaKids Team

Instructions

Sit with your legs wide apart in a triangle position.
Flex your heels and bend your toes toward you.The person with the smaller triangle should press her heels into her partner’s ankles.
Reach across with your right hands and shake hands or wrists.
Lift your left arm up above your head and over and as you stretch this entire side, shoulder, arms and fingertip. Keep your sit bones on the floor.
Lean over. Look up. Smile and breath in and out.
Change sides.

Help each other to obtain the best feelings in your body by helping each other in this wonderful stretch and find your edge (the place where it feels just right without too much trying).

Note to Parents and Teachers

Partner yoga poses are great ways to help children learn about cooperation, have fun and get fit too.

Activity Ideas for Home or Classroom

Musical Musings
Sing age appropriate songs or ditties as you connect and stretch. Have fun using reciting nursery rhymes, pop songs, knock, knock jokes or any call and response songs. Tell some really funny jokes or stories to each other and have a rib splitting laugh together.

Awesome Anatomy/Body Benefits
Feel the bones in your chest. They are called your ribs. When you practice this pose you create space between your ribs and this helps your breath become deeper, fuller and stronger. This rib splitting pose stretches your legs, hips, waist shoulders and fingers too. Remember to press through your sit bones. The fancy name for them is ischial tuberosities. Can you say that? How about Ischium? That one is a little easier.

Math Medley
Draw a circle or a square. How many triangles can you put inside of each of these forms? 2, 3, 8, 10? Have fun counting and color them too.

Nutrition Tip – Triangle Foods
What is one of most children’s favorite foods that is served in the shape of a triangle or a circle? Yup. Yum. Pizza. Instead of buying pizzas, make healthy ones together. Use whole grain dough, bagels, English muffins or tortillas. Use organic tomato sauce, lowfat or soy cheese and lots of veggies. Make funny faces with colorful strips of peppers, cherry tomato eyes, pineapple slices and other goodies.

Tyropitakia (pronounced tee-ro-pee-TAHK-yah) means “cheese pie triangles.” These tasty triangular cheese-filled pastries are fun finger foods for kids. Let young cooks try their hand at this. Once they get the hang of the folding, there will be no stopping them!

Bug Pickin’ Chimp

by YogaKids Team

Monkeys love to pick bugs and little eggs out of their friends’ fur and eat them. It’s called nit picking. Their arm-spread is longer than the length of their whole body. They easily arm-walk through the trees. They also knuckle-walk on the forest floor.

Instructions

Bend your knees and squat down on your feet. Walk around. Lead with your long arms and jump with your bent legs. On a soft surface, try ‘knuckle walking.’
Check each other for bugs and nits. Pick them out and pretend to eat them.
Make monkey sounds. Roll your lips away. Bare your teeth. Breathe with a “he he he” sound.
Make monkey lips and breathe with a “who, who, who sound.” Go back and forth.

You’ve cleaned each other up and fed yourselves too. Good monkeys! Reward yourself with a banana!

Activity Ideas for Home or Classroom

Bridge of Diamonds
Cooperation and taking care of one another is a good idea for all living things.

Math Medley
You picked ___ nits. Your friend picked ___. How many nits did you pick together?

Musical Musings
Sing to the melody of Five Little Monkeys.

“Bug pickin chimps went swinging through the trees.

They laughed and sang and breathed hee-hee.

Cleaned their fur til their coats were nit-free

Then shared big bananas for all to see.”

The Art of Sequencing

by Karen Martin

My 5K cross-country outing began with the intention to mostly run, not walk the distance. But it didn’t start that way. (I’m slow — and my walk is even slower.)The first 2 miles found me walking up the hills followed by a sluggish jog down the other side. Slow ,slow progress. But with one more mile to go. my jog DOWN hill became a jog UP the next hill. And the next. And continued this way until I actually “sprinted” to the finish. What was that all about I wondered? What just happened here?

Although my route started out feeling like a lot of stops and starts, I had a continuous pace at the finish. Cycling through those walk and jog segments must have prepared me for the last third of the course where I felt stronger and more competent. Intervals alternating between high and low activity allowed me to manage my energy and achieve a good outcome.

Most of my YogaKids students have the desire to accomplish ALL of the poses quickly and easily. But constant energy will likely falter. Sequencing a class with cycles of active and recovery segments can help kids finish strong and successful by the end of the session. Between challenging efforts for both mind and body, I insert recovery moments in the lesson plan.

Begin with gentle stretching of mental as well as physical “muscles” to engage the students. Peace Breath softens the face and calms the mind providing a quiet moment. Butterfly with Antenna involves “wing” movement and stimulates the pathway between the brain and body, offering a slightly more active segment.

Poses that use more movement and focus can alternate with resting asanas. Balancing in Eagle enlists concentration of the brain with attention to crossing arm and leg positions. Follow this with Child’s Pose, allowing time to breathe and relax. Active Spouting Dolphins cresting multiple waves may need to “float” on their bellies and rest a bit afterwards. Allowing time for that lower energy, quieter moment provides each student the time to rest, refresh, and re-center.

Yoga, like life, has hills AND valleys — acknowledging both can be a powerful tool for creating YogaKids classes.