Thank you to everyone who responded with information about yoga programs at your libraries. All of the responses were postive and I had quite a few requests for a compilation of results, so I have done that. My yoga teacher said she would be happy to do a one time program for me this summer. I am very happy about that . Thank you especially to Haidee O'Brien. The attachments are from her and she was willing to let me share them with you.
We have offered one-time sessions on a couple of occassions. Attendance was light, but those that came really enjoyed. the session. The instructor we used teaches at the local Community College and has written "The grandmother who stood on her head." She did not do any "spiritual" work with the group - but relaxing and focusing and of course stretches and some positions.
Hope this helps.
_____ got the local YMCA to come out and do a Yoga class for the teens during Teen Read Week. None of my teens showed. But! We had younger children come instead. They did really great. I think they liked being able to do things that the adults couldn't do easily. I think that if I had promoted it for younger kids, I would have had a nice headcount for the program.
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WE have had yoga as part of our summer reading for many years. My assistant does yoga and she just changes the names of the different positions to suit the theme. Sometimes she ties it in to exercising for football or basketball players and their warm ups. And she challenges the big boys to see how well they can do certain poses. She always stresses never to do anything that hurts and always do each pose slowly and concentarte on breathing. The kids can really get into it. We would have about 15 minutes of yoga and then back to the regular program.
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Hi Cathy,
We did a one time only yoga class for kids. We broke it down by ages and had two sessions; one for K-2 and one for 3-5. We had sign up and it went really well. I think we did the program over one of the school
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Cathy, I have had parent-child youga classes that were successful. They ran in a series of maybe 4 classes, the same time each week (in the evening). I also had a storytime-yoga class during the Xmas vacation that I heard was very successful. (I was supposed to be at work that morning but had a funeral I had to attend).
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Dear Cathy:
Yoga works! We've had lots of programs for elementary-aged kids and they love getting in all those animal positions and then even having little relay races. One team makes a tunnel with each person lined up in the "Downward Dog" position and the last person in lines crawls through it. Then the next person in the line goes and the person that just went becomes part of the tunnel. The first team to have every kid crawl through is the winner. But you don't even have to have the races - kids still love the act of getting in those poses. Good luck with the program.
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We did a children's Yoga program for kids 6 to 8 years old. It went really well! We played music in the background (I suppose you can use anything unobtrusive, but I actually found a CD of traditional music from India the kids thought was cool and exotic). We started with a simple story called, "The Happiest Tree, a Yoga Story" by Uma Krishnaswami. You can also use "Babar's Yoga for Elephants" by Brunhoff and "Yoga Bear" by Karen Pierce.
The first is simply a nice picture book story that includes Yoga in the plot line. The others are actually how-to's with fun kid-style Yoga activities. If you are not comfortable demonstrating, there are a lot of good, short Yoga videos for young children such as "Yoga Kids" by Dancing Feet Yoga Center.
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have not done a program, but I wanted to mention the picture book My Daddy is a Pretzel as something that would tie in well. We looked at it this week and it is a great book.
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Last year in my previous position at another Penna. Library we had a YogaKids program presented by an instructor from a local center. She placed parameters of 20 kids for the program. Parents were allowed to stay in the room. The session was one hour. She spoke with the kids about yoga and then guided them through the process. Parents and kids loved it. We allowed her to pass out her business cards and a pamphlet. She did not charge for the program. This was a 1-time deal. The class was full.
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Hi Cathy - we have done yoga with school age and even preschool age (incorporated into a storytime) and they have been very successful. We did a multi-week program in the summer for teens and for some reason got very little response, but the school age kids loved it.
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I actually integrate yoga into my music and movement program that I have twice a month. It's very much like what your yoga teacher is talking about only instead of animals I have the kids pretend to be sunflowers and we do a salutation to the sun routine. It's a great way to get them calm and centered for the rest of the program. I actually do this with pre-schoolers...so I'd think the grade school group would work even better.
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Hi Cathy-
I just did a program like this in January for one of our after-school events which are geared towards 8-14 year olds. I thought that it was a lot of fun even though the group wasn't that big (8 kids came).
I contacted a local yoga teacher that does some work with kids. She came and, like you mentioned, taught the kids about 10 animal poses and then we played games with them.
One game that was especially fun was the classic memory game "I went to the zoo one day" where each person adds on another animal they saw and you go around adding to the list and remembering what everyone else said, only she did it with the poses so...the first kid said "I went to the zoo one day and saw a dog." and we all did downward-facing dog. Then the next kid said "I went to the zoo one day and saw a turtle (and we all did the Turtle) and a dog (and we all did downward-facing dog)". etc.
I think it was very worth while program. I felt good having an active program and the kids and their adults seemed very pleased (some moms even wanted to participate!)
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Hi Cathy,
We had a one time yoga program for K-4 grades kids here at our library. We have a monthly after school program and were contacted by a yoga instructor who was interested in providing a free program for us. After checking out her references, we went ahead and made arrangements to have her come in January. She had the kids do some basic poses and then had them do various things as she told a story?for instance she would have them do some animal pose when that animal was part of the narrative. She was OK, although her presentation was a little short and one of the librarians helped out with some group participation things. But for a free program that was a little different, it was fine. As long as you check out the instructor and make sure they are comfortable working with kids, I would say try a one-time program
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Hello Cathy,
I did a very successful one-time yoga program for kids. I was lucky that a yoga instructor friend of mine, who was thinking about developing a yoga class of her own for kids, co-hosted the program with me free of charge. I may be too cautious, but I didn't want to advertise the program as "yoga" without a bona fide instructor on hand, even though I take yoga myself. One, the poses are so specific that I wasn't confident of doing them correctly. Two, I was a bit concerned about liability (injuries etc.).
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did a program for teens that was "Yoga for teens" a one time introductory course to see if yoga was for you. I contacted the YMCA and they had one of their instructors come over for free and we had the newspaper come out and it was a great event, one of my most popular. I know it would go well with grade school and middle schoolers too. it wasn't anything spiritual, just relaxation which can help them too.
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Hi there,
We did a one time yoga for kids program last summer as part of our Paws, Claws,
Scales, and Tales Summer Reading Program. We used animal poses as our connection
to the theme. There were about 8 girls who came to the program, so it was not as
well attended as some other things we were offering at the time. However, the kids
who came had fun! We requested that they bring their own bath towel to act as
their yoga mat.