Unit 1.8 Yoga and Mindfulness for Young Children

Welcome to the Move to Learn Training Series.  Please watch the Instructional Video, and then proceed to the Learning Guide.  Once you have completed the Learning Guide, go to the Self-Assessment Survey to complete this unit.  When you finish the Self-Assessment Survey, you will receive your certificate for this unit.

Instructional Video

 

 


Learning Guide

My child-centered view of mindfulness was shaped by an experience I had at a local public school a few years ago.  I was asked to work with the 2nd grade on mindfulness, with the goal of giving teachers tools to help children increase their social and emotional skills.  The school drew from a population traditionally underserved in our community.  The faculty struggled with academics and behavior issues, along with a school building in gross disrepair.  I arrived at the 2nd grade classroom ready to put a traditional approach to mindfulness into action to help these children and teachers.  I was greeted by two boys in a full out fist fight, and it was all I could do to separate them.  Immediately, those boys were taken into the hall, sat on the floor and addressed by the counselor.  In the meantime, I continued with the task at hand with the group in the classroom.  The remaining children were agitated, yelling and moving, unable to find any stillness.  We were interrupted by teachers who were also yelling.  It was clearly not a situation set up for success.

These children desperately needed mindfulness.  They needed to be grounded and in the present, to learn respect for each other and for themselves.  But these children needed the foundation that comes before mindfulness.  Mindfulness requires body control and body awareness, and these children had not established that crucial foundation.  When I visited the school, the playground was empty.  Behavior problems resulted in children sitting in the hallway in silence.  The school didn’t have a gym for PE class.  And, the students lived in a play desert, unsafe for outdoor, big body play. These children weren’t moving at school, and they weren’t moving at home.  They had not had the opportunity to build the physical skills and strengths needed to have the body control and awareness that underlies mindfulness.  How could they possibly find stillness, or as Oxford says, “calmly acknowledge and accept one’s bodily sensations,” when they hadn’t experienced movement?  Instead, children need to use movement to find stillness.

An innovative program at an elementary school in Alexandria, Virginia, provides an alternative approach to leverage children’s natural need to move.  Students who are having trouble controlling their bodies are given a Movement Prescription.  They can use that Movement Prescription when they need time to reset their bodies.  They can either join the PE class in progress or engage in a set of defined movement activities for 20 minutes before returning to class.  These activities, such as shooting baskets or juggling a soccer ball, get the child moving in a thoughtful way that requires focus.  The activities also emphasize crossing the midline which strengthens cross-hemisphere connections in the brain.  After filling the Movement Prescription, the student returns to class with a more-settled brain, ready to be part of the classroom community again.

So, how is this approach better than sitting a child in the hallway?  In both cases, the distraction is removed from the classroom so the rest of the class can continue with the school day.  However, with the Movement Prescription, the child sent to the gym is given a constructive outlet for channeling behavior.  And the teachers have found that when children return to the classroom, they can easily catch up with their peers and their work.  More fundamentally, the Movement Prescription takes into account the developmental needs of the child to move, especially when upset or agitated.  With movement, the out-of-sorts child can find some solace, allowing executive function to take the wheel back from the primitive brain.

The best part is that, over time, teachers have found that children who have Movement Prescriptions begin to initiate this process themselves.  Children start to recognize the feelings that trigger the teacher to send them to the gym before the teacher can see it.  They can ask to go to the gym proactively, rather than being told to go.  They learn the coping skills necessary to navigate their feelings because they are given constructive tools that work for their young, active bodies.  This is mindfulness for a young child.

Things to read

Here are some articles to get you excited about the benefits of outdoor, full body play.

Equipment

The beauty of yoga and mindfulness – no equipment needed!  But, our Yoga Cards are a great tool for using yoga with young children.  Download them here.  

Quick Idea: Yoga during Waiting

Use yoga poses during the dreaded waiting times, whether it is waiting to wash hands, for the music teacher, or for carpool.  Playing Yoga Pose Draw is a great way to keep kids’ bodies active in small spaces.  Using pictures that represent poses, build a deck of cards or use our cards and let one child at a time draw a card.  After naming the pose, children do the pose together.  For example, a child draws the card with a picture of a tree.  He names it and then all children stand up and do Tree Pose together.

Printable Yoga Cards II

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These downloadable beauties with a child in a yoga pose and a gorgeous drawing of what the pose represents, will help both teachers and children learn both the poses and their names!

Printable Yoga Cards

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These downloadable beauties with a child in a yoga pose and a gorgeous drawing of what the pose represents, will help both teachers and children learn both the poses and their names!

Move to Learn Activity: Big Body Mindfulness

Help children recognize present feelings by recognizing what their bodies are doing and how they feel. When they learn to recognize their physical feelings, they can transfer that knowledge to recognizing their emotional feelings.  Once they begin to recognize that physical feelings change, they can also learn that emotional feelings change too.

  • Have children jump across the room.  Then ask them where in their bodies they felt the jumping.  Obviously, they felt it in their feet, but where else?
  • Have children do tree pose and ask where in their bodies they felt tree pose
  • Have children move across the room like snakes.  Ask them where in their bodies they felt the floor.  Ask them how this made them feel like a snake
  • Ask them to jump across the room again.  Ask them if they felt powerful when they were jumping. Ask them what powerful means to them
  • Ask them to do tree pose again and ask them how they felt strong like a big thick tree or bendy like a tree in a breeze
  • Ask them to move across the room like a snake.  Ask them how that made them feel. Big or small?  Strong or feeble?
  • Tell the children they are going to be superheroes.  Ask them what powers superheroes have.
  • Explain that their superpowers are smell and hearing.
  • The children are going to move around the room like superheroes, anyway they think a superhero might move.  But when you say freeze, they must freeze exactly where they are and turn on the super power you name.  Then, secretly, they use that superpower and see what they notice.  They keep it a secret until later – no shouting out until everyone has had a chance to explore that superpower.
  • The first time they freeze, they are going to use their sense of smell.  They freeze in place and then sniff to see what smells they can smell – either close by or far away.  In their minds they try to describe the smell.  Is it good, bad, sweet, stinky…?  Once everyone has had time to sniff, ask them to yell out what they smelled.
  • Repeat the process having them move like superheroes all over the room.  This time, they freeze and use their super hearing.  They will listen for things that are close by and super far away.  They must keep them secret but try in their minds to name the sounds they hear.  Then ask them to yell out what they heard and how far away they might think the sound was.

Move to Learn Brainstorming Assignment: Yoga during Transitions

Transitions are always a challenging time.  Often, during transitions, we try to keep kids still and focused on moving to the next thing, rather than making the transition time meaningful and beneficial.  Consider ways you could use the Pop, Hop & Rock™ Yoga Cards to help overcome these often challenging moments.

As described above, mindfulness for a young learner is most successful when it begins with movement.  Consider ways to incorporate mindfulness into your day through movement and big body physicality.

Resources 

Here are some Pop, Hop & Rock games to get you started thinking about ways to use our yoga cards:

Yoga Pose Garden

Equipment:

  • Garden Bucket
  • Felt board or laminated cardstock and tape
  • Laminated garden themed pictures that are yoga poses: flower, tree, bridge, fish, rabbit, cobra, turtle, dead bug

Set Up: Place all the pictures in the bucket.

How to Play: Children will take turns choosing items from the bucket and placing them on the felt board or tacking them to the laminated cardboard setting up a garden as they go.

While children are sticking the item to the board, perhaps discuss what that item does in the garden (rabbits might look for carrots, dogs might find a sunny place to snooze, dead bugs might have been stepped on…) or what it needs to grow (flowers and trees need sun.)

After each item has been tacked to the board do the yoga pose with the children.

Yoga Pose Hunt

Equipment:

  • Pop, Hop & Rock™ Yoga Cards
  • Upbeat music

Set-up: Place the cards with the photo of a child doing the pose side up in a large circle.   Have the children pick a card and stand next to it, on the outside of the circle. 

How to Play:  Turn on the music and the children will walk around the circle.  When the music stops, they freeze, look down at the closest yoga card and try to make their bodies look like the child’s body on the card.  Play the music again and they walk around the circle.  Repeat until they have attempted all of the poses.

Self-Assessment Survey

Once you have completed the activities and collaborative assignment for this unit, click here to access the Self Assessment Survey.  

PD 1.8 Yoga and Mindfulness Printable Cards

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Helpful reminders!