kids yoga poses

Free Earth Day Kids Yoga Lesson Plan and Coloring Page

Earth Day Lesson Plan for Kids Yoga

Earth Day provides a great theme for kids yoga to show our love of the planet, yoga style. Here’s an Earth Day lesson plan and free coloring page for your consideration:

Starting Your Lesson With an Opening Reflection Circle

To begin your class set an intention and reflect on Earth Day. Use the breathing ball (as shown in photo) as an analogy to teach awareness. The breathing ball starts out small, but expands into a larger circle. Our thinking can expand the same way the ball does. We start out seeing the small view and then expand our awareness to see the big picture.

Ask your students open question like: “What can you do to connect with the Earth?” They can share their responses when they hold the ball.

children pass a brething ball in a circle in kids yoga class to share their thoughts and feelings — Kids Pass the Breathing Ball as a way to share their thoughts and feelings.

Start your Children’s Yoga Class with Playful Movement

Use the 3 R’s, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, for fun in your kids yoga class.

Reduce: Don’t Forget Your Bags!

Plastic bags make up tons of landfill that you can reduce by bringing your own bags. Take a shopping trip on a row of mats (give children cushioning to crawl around) with these ideas:

Select Your Groceries Wisely: Make up Yoga poses for various grocery store items. What do you get at the grocery store? Cookies (the kids can think of a cookie pose (eg: bow pose), bananas (crescent moon pose) or butternut squash (triangle pose). How can you reduce your waste when you shop?
Check Out: Crawl under Downward Dog pose to send your groceries down the conveyor belt to the cashier
Human Grocery Bin: Put each item in your reusable grocery bag (Boat pose) after they come off the conveyor belt, do boat pose to make a bag for the groceries to go in. If someone doesn’t do boat pose, they forget their grocery bag and can jog home to get it (jog on the spot).

Discuss items that get forgotten when it comes to recycling and composting in the home. You’ll be surprised how the little things can reduce your impact:

toilet paper rolls be recycled in paper
used tissues can go in compost
skip the clear plastic bags for produce when possible (your bananas don’t need to go in a bag!)

downward dog tunnel in kids yoga with yoga teacher trainers during certification — Crawling under downward dog to put your groceries away.

Reuse: Hand-Me-Down Game

This game can teach kids about passing down clothes and other reusable items that they don’t want any more. Did you know some people have taken a pledge of zero waste and they only shop at second hand stores?

Kids can play Hand Me Down Ball and pass a ball like a hand me down, passing over and under the other kids as they do different poses like Warrior, Bridge, and Tree Pose

Recycle: Yoga poses

4 children can pick 4 yoga poses, then the rest of the class can put them in order from largest to smallest to demonstrate minimizing waste and reducing recycling. For example, flow from Warrior to Downward Dog to Camel to Child Pose. Continue till everyone has had a chance to pick a pose.

relaxation during kids yoga class and kids yoga teacher training — Relaxation provides time to reflect on on the theme of the Lesson Plan and then relax.

Complete Your Lesson Plan with Relaxation

For relaxation invite your students to rest on their backs and become still. Reflect on what you’ve talked about today. Imagine you do something for Earth Day. What will it be? Will you reduce, recycle, reuse, compost? Who will support you in your goals? How can you share your idea with your community, friends and family?

After the relaxation, ask if anyone would like to share any final thoughts from class.

Draw a picture of your idea to bring home if time permits. Try this .Earth Day Coloring Page

Hope you love this lesson plan and look forward to April 22nd as much as we do. Have fun celebrating Earth Day!!

Upcoming Events:

Upcoming Kids Yoga Teacher Training Courses and Dates in Toronto at this link — Our next Kids Yoga Teacher Training starts soon – Check out next dates!

Back to School Kids Yoga Lesson Plan

Summer time is holiday time, but at Young Yoga Masters, school is open and learning abounds. We just finished a 10 Day Summer Certification. For many of the teachers in the training, their classrooms were empty and they were sitting on the other side of the desk or mat for a change. They were getting their Certificate to be a kids yoga teacher.

The 10 days were packed full of information, fun, and new friends. It was a pleasure to meet everyone there and see them grow as kids yoga teachers!

I’m excited for the next 10 Day Summer Certification starting August 8/14 in Pennsylvania. It will be back to school time for a new group of student eager to get their 95 Hour Certificate with our Yoga Alliance Registered Children’s Yoga School. For those who can attend, there is still time to enroll in this Summer Certification.

Back to school may be weeks or days away, or maybe you are still in school, here’s a powerful yoga lesson plan for you. It’s one of my favorite stories for back to school, a Zen story, about what it means to learn. It’s The Story of the Empty Cup.

The Story of the Empty Cup for Back to School Yoga

Once a student of Zen went to learn from the Master. When he arrived, he was invited into the Master’s room where the Master began to make tea for them. The student was so excited and wanted to impress the Master so much, he began talking on and on about all the courses he had taken and all the insight he had already gained. The student talked and talked while the Master boiled water, laid out the cups, and set the tea to steep.

As the Master took his seat, the student continued to ramble on. The Master picked up the tea pot and began pouring tea into the student’s cup. The tea filled the cup. The Master kept pouring. The tea spilled over the rim. The student finally stopped talking and stared in amazement.

As the tea flowed from cup to saucer, the student called out, “Stop pouring, the cup is full, it can’t hold any more!”

The Master stopped and softly said, “If you have come to learn, you must come with an empty cup. Nothing more will fit in a cup that is full. To learn, you must empty your cup.”

The Empty Cup Kids Yoga Lesson Plan

The first part of The Empty Cup Kids Yoga Lesson Plan is to tell the story (above) and then discuss it with the kids. Depending on the age of the children and their depth of understanding this could take 10 – 15 minutes.

Some questions for consideration:

What is the moral/lesson of the story?
Why did the Master let the tea overflow in the cup?
Have you ever had someone ask you a question then not listen to the answer? Have you ever done this to someone else? How did that feel?
What does it look like when someone is ready to learn?

Kids Yoga Lesson Plan for the Empty Cup Story

If you’ve worked with children, you know that often when you finish a story the kids will implore you tell it again.

In this lesson plan you can tell the story again with even more yoga poses than in the picture above. I can think of 12 poses, if you have another idea, please add it in the comments.

Student goes to the Master (4 yoga poses): by Train (train arms), Bicycle (bicycle legs), boat (boat pose on belly), and walking up a mountain (high stepping)
Sees the Master’s home (2 poses): Entering the home (Downward Dog), takes a seat (chair pose)
Master Makes Tea (4 poses): Getting water (standing forward bend to reach water from the well), adding tea (crescent moon to reach for tea on shelf – both sides), fill tea pot (bow pose), lays out cups (V pose/full boat pose)
Pours the Tea (1 pose): Teapot (Triangle Pose – on each side)
Empty the Cup (1 pose): Easy Pose or Shivasana

Through Kids Yoga Poses and Stories – Kids Get Ready to Learn

Through story, kids learn by moving and you also create a vocabulary with your class, it’s like a special language between you. When the kids are full of ideas, you can say, “Now its time to empty the cup” and they’ll know exactly what you mean. If they don’t, well, you can just tell the story again till they remember it.

Upcoming Events:

Got an Empty Cup?

You can sign up for Kids Yoga Teacher Training modules throughout the year. Click to find out more. I would love to see you there!

Top 10 Kids Yoga Animal Poses

kids yoga poses - camel pose — Camel Pose in Kids Yoga – Instruct kids to Keep the Neck long

There’s a question that every new kids yoga teacher asks when doing kids yoga: How do I teach kids yoga animal poses?

Yoga animal poses are part of the basic tools for teaching kids. You’ll find them in many kids yoga books like:

The Yoga Zoo Adventure for Little Kids by Helen Purperhart
Fly Like A Butterfly: Yoga for Children by Shakta Kaur Khalsa (I’ve bought this book twice, my first one I used so much it fell apart!)
Stuffed Animals for Yoga Class Help Kids Focus from the Yoga in My School blog
Animals themes like bats and Spiders in this post: Halloween Yoga for Kids from the Childlight Yoga blog.

I have to admit my original weekend kids yoga teacher training didn’t include a yoga animal story. Yoga animals are part of other themes like in the Story of the Lion Cub who Was Raised by Goats – we do lions and even a goat pose! But in my desire to do a kids yoga training with new information than what was already out there, animal yoga did not make the first module of training.

Animals and yoga go together so naturally, I mean the poses are named after animals, so it really is a fundamental of yoga. So I cover it here and include animals in the 95 Hour Training manuals now too.

My Top 10 Favourite Animal Yoga Poses for Kids

Here are my current top ten favorite yoga animal poses:

Camel Ride – a basic warm-up in Kundalini Yoga, sit in easy pose, hold your ankles, inhale lift your spine forward and up, exhale and relax your spine back – as if you were riding on a camel.
Elephant taking a Shower: stand up and make a trunk with your arms, keep your legs straight and dip your trunk into the imaginary watering hole in front of you, then lift your trunk up and spray the water like a shower.
Frog: squat and stretch your legs like a frog warming up and then jump!
Cobra Pose: there is nothing more fun in preschool yoga than to talk to each other by wagging our tongues.
Downward Dog: there are so many options with downward dog for individuals, partners, and groups.
Butterfly Drinking Nectar: sitting, put your feet together and knees bent wide apart. Flutter your legs up and down like a butterfly. Then move your chest to your feet and drink the nectar from a flower in front of you.
Cheetah: move quickly on all fours like a cheetah running across the land.
Camel Pose: See the picture above – an advanced pose, but a good challenge in the right setting.
Unicorn: Make your hands into a magical unicorn horn over the centre of your head then gallop.
Monkey Eating Bananas: a favorite with preschool children, and teachers, because you get to do your monkey sounds (oo oo oo, aa aa aa). We start squatting like a monkey, then climb an invisible tree and stretch to pick bananas, climb back down to a squat and eat our bananas.

two boys are at the petting zoo with the baby pigs. Kids love animals so animal yoga is a natural fit. — Kids love animals so kids yoga with animal poses is a natural fit

How to Teach Animal Yoga Poses

Start an animal yoga class by saying, “Put your hand up if you like animals.” You’ll get so many hands you may have to limit comments from the kids, and quickly find out animals they like.

You can also let the children know that some feel the yoga poses came from watching how animals stretch.

Then invite the children to do some animal yoga. I’ve never had young kids say no, although the older kids (10 – 12 yrs) may lose interest in this topic. You may want to take it up a notch by doing endangered species yoga, or let them teach the poses.

Then you’ll be off to the races, or should I say the Zoo, going through all the poses, plus the ones the kids make up.

What are your favorite Animal Yoga Poses and Games to teach or do?