Well, what a journey this has been! I am thankful for the opportunities to grow, learn and evolve in yoga, with my children and in my knowledge of educational technology.

These are the goals I started out with for my project:

Goals:

• To create my own digital resource folder of kids yoga activities.

• Practice new yoga activities with my kids and friends at home

• Record Practice Teaching Videos to share with EDTC 300 classmates

• Create a Kids Yoga Channel on YouTube

Here is what I achieved:

• I explored and shared many resources for kids yoga with classmates

• As I began to work on my own guide, I created an outline, but I decided to leave it open for now… One of the things I realized is that in my own journey as a yoga teacher, I am still developing my own style of teaching yoga to kids. For me, part of this practice involves reflecting on how I might best support other educators to incorporate more movement work into their classes. I would like to eventually work as an Educational Consultant, and I imagine that yoga and movement work would fit into that!

I feel I need a few more years experience and practice (and perhaps another professional level training) to be ready to create the kind of guide I would truly like to create.

For now, I have the following outline to share – the topics I feel would be most important to include in my draft guide.

• I was successful in recording and uploading some yoga practice videos with my kids: three videos in total!

• I created a YouTube Channel: Yoga Meditations with Dani Kay to share my videos with classmates, teachers, students, family and friends.

I also learned:

• I love video editing! At first, I felt daunted by the challenge. As I started to get into it, I realized it is not as hard as it looked at first glance. There are just different steps and processes to learn. The more I break it down, and figure out, the easier and more natural the process becomes. It’s already getting faster for me too!

• Canva is the coolest program ever! I can’t wait to spend more time with it!

• It is way harder to do yoga with your own kids than someone else’s kids!

Some of my challenges:

• It would have been nice to organize a group of kids outside to do a kids yoga practice and record it – because of time constraints I was not able to do this. I am also hesitant to ask my friends about videoing their kids to put on the internet. It just feels outside of my comfort zone.

• I was dealing with health issues that affected my breathing. Actually, the catalyst for the issues was connected to this project – I have been working on a wall at my house, to use as a background for shooting yoga films. My painter did some sanding for me – the sanding triggered my asthma – and had affected my ability to talk, laugh and sing (and teach yoga!) for several weeks. For this reason, I had to be flexible with my project, including the content and the focus of the project. I ended up spending more time on iMovie and learning to video edit than I initially planned as my goal. This worked out for though, as it is now something I am starting to feel passionate about as a new skill!

• I can feel overwhelmed by all of the kids’ yoga content available on the internet. Sometimes it seems like everyone is just out to make money and it is impossible to know who to trust. There is lots of great content out there, but you have to hunt around for it. The discovery of Mercury Reader is helpful because at least it helps you cut out some of the advertisements when you are reading.

My yoga guide outline (I think this could turn into a book one day!):

Thanks to everyone for following along!

I am happy to help anyone anytime. Please feel free to reach out to me if you ever have any questions about kids yoga or trauma-informed yoga. Anytime!

Take care,

Dani

The Sun Shines on Everyone is a song by Snatam Kaur. It is often used in kids’ yoga practice. It is a nice song for adults to listen to as well. It contains a powerful message about inclusion.

“The sun shines on everyone – it doesn’t make choices. When it rains – it rains on everyone – it doesn’t make choices.” 

Teaching kids about inclusion: Let us just have love and acceptance of everyone. Of all of their beauty. Of all of their difficulties and differences too. Of course, life can be more complicated than this. But when we start with messages of inclusion, we lay an important foundation.

“The one spirit lives in everyone – it doesn’t make choices. It doesn’t make choices.”

We are all connected. As humans and beings of this earth. We are all worthy of being here.

“Peace to all. Love to all.”

Kids Yoga Practice

Options:

• You could just put this song on and let your kids dance or have it play in the background.

• You can use it as transition music in the classroom, as kids move from one activity to the next.

-You could experiment with a movement practice: adding yoga forms to the music. Feel free to get creative with this! My kids like to make up their own yoga forms!

“The sun shines on everyone”

“When it rains, it rains on everyone”

“The one spirit lives in everyone”

Bedtime or Restime Song

Options:

• You could sing this song to or with your kids for quiet time or relaxation time.

I’ve taught my kids the words to this song and we like to sing it at bedtime now. 

• I worked with an amazing Kindergarten teacher in my ECS 100 Practicum – she regularly incorporated quiet time/rest time for the kids into her class. She would play calming/relaxing music to them in the background. Yoga (and the use of this song and practices) could easily be incorporated into various resting practices in schools.

My learning project work continues this week! Here is the finished product:

A few weeks ago, my dear friend Emily came by. I had asked her to help me explore some kids yoga practices with me and my two kids. In my learning project (kids yoga) one of the big insights I have had is this:

Practicing yoga with kids is so much better with friends!

In fact, having a high adult to child ratio when exploring yoga with kids will make a practice go smoother, easier, and allow for more 1:1 attention for the littles – especially when you are working with younger children.

This advice applies both in the classroom, and at home…the more support available for children, the better!

For this video, I used a few apps:

Canva

Epidemic Sound

iMovie

Here are a few helpful handouts and links on breathing exercise with kids:

Calm Breathing Handout for Parents and Educators

Five Fun Breathing Exercises for Kids

10 Breathing Exercises for Kids with Anxiety or Anger

After much reflection, and contemplation, my learning project took a bit of a turn this week.

After scouring the web for kids yoga videos and ideas, I realized that while there is tons of amazing and useful content out there…something is missing!

This was my big insight…that both Education students and Educators need more support in feeling comfortable and confident to experiment with, and to implement, kids yoga and mindfulness practices into the classroom.

I had a few different ideas for video content: The first would be a video just for Education Students to help find their inner calm. I believe that we need to establish our own inner sense of calm, before we can share this with others. This is a practice that we can grow into and that will shift and change over time.

The next video will focus on establishing and using our inner calm as we seek to support children and other students within the classroom.

This was my first time ever making a Yoga Meditation video. It was a really exciting and interesting process! I am really looking forward to making more videos, and refining my editing skills. For now, this is the best I’ve got!

I hope there is something for you – that you may find helpful along your own path – in this video.

Steps:

-Checked to see if I have iMovie on my Mac. For some reason, I do not, so I downloaded it!

-I went into the program, and played around on my own for a bit to try to get a feel for the program.

-I got stuck and realized I need some support – so I went to YouTube and searched for Tutorial Videos. Here are a few that I found helpful:

Watching tutorials, I realized how important it is to make sure you have good, clear content to work with. This could include videos, photos, and audio/music.

So far, I have not been able to generate that much content. With my busy work and school schedule, it has been challenging for me to create the space and time with my kids to practice yoga together. An additional challenge for me, is with the basement yoga studio construction project in my house, the sanding dust triggered a huge asthma/allergy response in me.

It has affected my ability to talk, sing and laugh!

Here is a photo of my basement yoga space.

The wood wall in the back was coated in a varathane finish. It needed to be sanded to get the look I want to achieve. But I had no idea what type of reaction it would trigger in me! After many attempts to clean the dust, including days and nights of a cold Yukon breeze blowing through open windows, multiple air purifiers, paying a professional to clean, and trying different asthma and allergy medications to help me feel better – nothing was working.

Earlier this weekend, I ended up at the hospital – requesting more extensive treatment. A few days of steroid medication later, and I am hoping to be back on the mend soon – to have my yoga, meditation and singing voice ready to use in my classes again, and to be able to laugh, talk and connect with the people I love without having to gasp for air.

For this week’s learning, I reviewed an idea from one of the kids yoga websites I follow: Kids Yoga Stories.

The title of this Yoga Lesson is “Family Yoga in Outer Space” but it can easily be adapted for the classroom, by renaming it to “Classroom Yoga in Outerspace”

I really liked the ideas for warming up by pretending to be a spaceship, and going through different outer space movements and references. It sounds so fun! This activity could be done in a larger space, with a teacher to guide the class, and by letting kids take turns to demo or teach! Some matching art cards would be a helpful tool. There are lots of other great classroom ideas here too. Space alien craft project, anyone?

Family Yoga in Outer Space Lesson Plan

Benefits of Yoga for Children:

-Calms and clears the mind

-Brings your child into the present moment

-Relieves tension and stress

-Increases concentration, focus and attention span

-Promotes thinking and boosts memory

-Stimulates auditory processing and responsiveness

-Expands imagination and creativity

Improves ability to be less reactive, more mindful of thoughts, speech and action

-Reduces stress and anxiety

-Balances low/high energy levels

-Improves attention and emotional control

-Positively influences neurotransmitter function

-Flynn, L. (2013). Yoga for Children. Adams Media, p. 22

Providing a Trauma-Informed Yoga Environment (knowledge base from my own training background)

-Providing and emphasizing choice

-Helping kids to feel a sense of control over their own body

-Be positive and encouraging

-If a child wants to observe instead of participating, let that be okay. Teach them that they are allowed to make choices with their own body!

-Provide access to doorways and exits (and make sure you have a helper to check on kiddos if anyone needs to take a break!). Be aware of lighting. There is always the potential for triggers, including emotional and physical safety triggers in traumatized kids.

-Provide opportunities to feel what’s happening in their body in safe, supportive ways and environments

-Let them know it’s okay to stop anytime.

This week, I was also able to get some of my video equipment unboxed and closer to being ready to be used. Here it is: nicely organized in the back of my closet!

A few years ago, I took a kids yoga teacher training at Semperviva Yoga Studio in Vancouver, B.C. I was only able to complete the first module of the training. I had hoped to return to complete the training, however, this studio and training program has now closed permanently due to the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Why I am doing this:

I love practicing yoga – in my life, with my kids, and for my work. I feel that I have a lot of skills yet to learn and practice when it comes to kids yoga!

Now is the perfect time to study, learn, grow and then put my new skills into action!

What are my plans to get started:

1. Review the materials I already have. This includes a kids yoga teacher training manual, several books, and checking through my emails to see which websites I am subscribed to.
2. Review online resources – preferably free or affordable. Any training program that I consider taking would need to be shorter in length, or learn-at-your-own-pace (due to time constraints of the course).
3. Check in with other kids yoga teachers who are familiar to me – do they have websites? Would any of them (perhaps the ones I am already friends with) be willing to send me some of their favourite online resources

Goals:

-To create my own digital resource folder of kids yoga activities.

-Practice new yoga activities with my kids and friends at home

-Record Practice Teaching Videos to share with EDTC 300 classmates

-Create a Kids Yoga Channel on YouTube

Bonus Work:

I am currently in the process of renovating my basement. I think it will make a great space for shooting some sweet little yoga videos! If all goes well, I will try doing some recordings there for this assignment. The timing of this course could not be more perfect!!

…Now if only I had the time to take on video editing!