Children's Yoga

 

After receiving my 200 hour yoga teacher certification, one of my first yoga gigs was assisting a kid's yoga class. They were ages 4-7. This was an ASSITANT job and I thought it was going to be so much fun and so rewarding... it wasn't. There was a group of 5-8 kids each week and they were horrible. They would bounce off the walls the whole time, yelling and screaming, and maybe because I wasn't the head instructor or maybe because they could smell my fear, they refused to listen to a word I said. I tried creating fun games and even bringing in my ukulele to sing about different poses and being quiet and calm but instead the games turned into sprinting around the room and climbing on top of yoga props and my ukulele songs turned into a war about who would strum the tiny guitar and impersonate Miley Sirus next. My romantic idea of teaching kids yoga died pretty quickly and the memory still haunts me to this day.
Then a very close friend of mine who coordinates events at a local library in town asked me to teach a kids class this past winter. I could hear the screaming voices ringing in my ears again as I started to push the word no out of my mouth but instead I decided to accept the challenge and face my fear because I am a grown woman and I needed to stop being afraid of children.
It took me2 years to give it another go and I am so glad I did. It was great! My advice to anyone thinking about teaching yoga to kids:
1)wear lots of flowers in your hair, they are facinated by them and can't take their eyes off of your head
2)encourage the parent's to join the class and practice next to their children
3)children have a 2 second attention span so in order for them to hang out in a pose for more than 2 seconds you need to come up with cute animal names for each pose so they can use their imagination and pretend they are each animal-this can get them rowdy so remember to have lots of quiet animals (example: the snake goes tssssssssssss, the clam goes blub blub blub).
When you have a bad teaching experience, don't give up! Had I not given children's yoga another chance I would have never gained back that confidence and learned something new.