Yoga Articles General Discussion

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Let’s teach kids!

You have to realize that while yoga can be fun, you still need some pointers on how to teach kids yoga. Kids have a shorter attention span but have more flexible bodies than most adults.


It becomes important to explain to kids why you are doing each pose, along with how to do it right.

Basic guidelines

Let’s look at some guidelines for teaching kids yoga:

• An average session should be between 15 to 30 minutes.
• Warm up and stretching is important even for children.
• Demonstrate the pose and gently guide the child. Do not emphasize on the child getting the pose perfectly right. Repetition will help.
• Take breaks and encourage the children to sit still during these breaks. These are only basic guidelines and can be changed and suited depending on the general age and skill of the group.

Tips

You can try some tips to help teach children yoga faster. Yoga can be fun but with adults you only need to convince adults of the benefits of yoga. With children, it becomes important to position yoga as a fun activity that your child and his friends would love to learn.

• Create a routine or rhythm around the yoga practice – a chant, a song or even a uniform -- that unifies the children
• Tell stories around the poses, giving it the hue of an adventure.
• Bring in games they are used to playing like ‘Follow the leader’ while doing yoga poses

Yoga Poses

Some of the main yoga poses that you can teach kids are:

• Archer pose (Dhanurasana)
• Mountain pose (Tadasana)
• Tree pose (Vakrasana)
• Cobra pose (Bhujangasana)
• Sun salutation (Suryanamaskar)
• Fish pose (Matsyasana)

Benefits

There are many benefits of children doing yoga. Not only will you find a good outlet to all that restless energy, it is a good idea for a hobby class for the summer.

• Yoga will improve your child’s confidence, flexibility and concentration
• These poses are good for your child’s general self-esteem
• It will relax his or her mind.

There is always the chance that getting your children interested in yoga early on might result in a lifelong good habit.

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