Melbourne-based primary teacher Carissa Shale explored how yoga can be incorporated into the curriculum in our ‘Teacher’s Voice’ feature in Education Matters Primary issue in June 2024. She is passionate about inquiry-based pedagogy, and believes wellbeing is at the core of every classroom.
June 21st marked the 10th year of celebrating International Yoga Day, introduced in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to raise awareness of the benefits of practising yoga as a holistic approach to health and wellbeing.⁷
The Central Council for Research in Yoga and Naturopathy in India, the birthplace of yoga, recently conducted a comprehensive review of existing global research into the role of yoga in enhancing student wellbeing and academic performance. In summary, the review highlights the overwhelming positive impacts of yoga on physical health, mental wellbeing, and cognitive capacities and argues that adding yoga into educational settings can improve concentration, reduce stress, raise self-awareness, and improve overall academic achievement.³
In recent years, there has certainly been an increase in visibility of children’s yoga, as more yoga schools begin to offer classes for children. Furthermore, yoga schools have begun to offer a range of professional development and teacher training sessions for educators wanting to learn how to teach yoga to children and young people.
Gopola Amir Yaffa is the Co-Founder of Rainbow Yoga, the biggest children’s yoga teacher training school in the world.⁴ Since 2007, Rainbow Yoga has trained more than 30,000 teachers in the art of teaching yoga to children.⁴ Yaffa strongly believes in the life-changing nature of yoga education, and has seen a definite increase in the need for children’s yoga in recent years.
“Yoga is a fantastic tool to teach children about the world, nature, animals, themselves, their mind, their emotions, their bodies and many life lessons such as kindness, friendship, resilience, confidence, equality, self-expression and many more,” Yaffa says.
Educational and Developmental Psychologist, Carrie Parratt, is a trained yoga teacher who has taught yoga to students aged from Lower Kinder to Grade 3. Parratt currently uses yoga techniques regularly in her role as a wellbeing coordinator and believes yoga has a wealth of benefits for primary-aged students, as it links the body, breath and mind. Parratt believes yoga is physical, so helps the body to stretch and be limber, it is about the breath, so it helps with self-awareness, and gives strategies to help students feel calm, grounded and centered.
So if yoga is seen to be so beneficial for children, how can it be incorporated into an already jam-packed school curriculum?
Establishing a daily routine
Through her extensive experience working in school environments, Parratt believes yoga can be incorporated in the classroom in a variety of simple and accessible ways, including as a brain and body break throughout the day, or as extracurricular activities for students, such as lunchtime clubs. However, Parratt believes starting the day with a short yoga session as a morning routine for students is the most valuable way to incorporate yoga into a school culture as it becomes a given life skill for everyone to learn and benefit from. Practicing a morning yoga routine also allows students to start their day in a calm, and grounded manner, while creating predictability and safety for those children who thrive in routine.
Studies have shown regular yoga practice to be particularly beneficial for neurodivergent students. Acting as a holistic mind-body intervention, yoga balances the autonomic nervous system by regulating the high levels of stress response in children with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), influencing their mind and body into a state of calmness and relaxation.⁵ Furthermore, yoga can develop social skills such as imitation and communication skills, eye contact, tolerance, and emotional regulation in children with ASD.⁵
Yaffa believes that yoga is not only a powerful addition to the school day, but can even be adapted to become a powerful tool to teach absolutely anything, through movement and experiential learning. Ken Robinson’s famous criticism of most school systems was the fact that students are treated as “heads on sticks”, while their body has no active role in learning and is instead a “form of transport for their heads”.⁶ An overwhelming amount of research now supports the “understanding that the brain is not disconnected from the rest of the body … but an organ occupied with processing perceptions experienced in the body”.¹
In simple terms, learning through movement and multi-sensory presentations, or embodied learning, is the most efficient mode for both retaining information and being able to draw it back when we need it.²
Yaffa says it is possible to explore core subjects such as history, geography, science, literature, maths, geometry and languages through creative yoga poses, allowing yoga to become a holistic practice that embodies learning in abstract ways. Embodied learning gives “children a non-language dependent medium through which to think about ideas … and to grow as thinkers”.⁸
Unfortunately, current research is limited in the sense that it looks predominantly at older students, with a heavy focus on secondary students and university students. However, many believe that students of all ages can reap the benefits of regular yoga practice. According to Yaffa, viewing yoga as a “giant toolbox of practices and techniques” helps you realise that everyone can do yoga. It’s all about starting from where you are, and improving your body awareness “step by step”. Parratt also believes that yoga is a “valuable activity for all ages … and can easily be adapted to suit each”.
Timing is one of the core ways of adapting yoga to suit a variety of ages. As a rule of thumb, Parratt recommends that teachers only expect students to engage in breath work or meditation for the same length of time as their age. Therefore, a child aged five should only be expected to engage and hold focus for five minutes at a time.
To ensure maximum effect, Parratt also recommends keeping yoga practice dynamic and fun, particularly for younger students, and using games and circle activities to help keep them connected. Yaffa recommends taking a progressive approach that considers students’ developmental age.
Through Yaffa’s Rainbow Yoga programs, teachers use songs, storybooks, props and visual cues to keep their youngest students engaged, while gradually incorporating yoga journeys and storytelling. Slowly, more meaningful themes are introduced, full of life lessons and coping skills to help [students] with the growing demands of life.
Yaffa strongly believes that there is always a way to incorporate yoga into the classroom. The secret is to experiment and trial new techniques until you find the best methods which engage and benefit the individual children in your class. While yoga clearly offers a range of benefits for primary-aged children, it is not only a solution for the present, but a life-long gift that may benefit individuals well beyond their school life.
References
1. Branscombe, M. (2019). Teaching through embodied learning: Dramatizing key concepts from informational texts. New York, NY: Routledge.
2. Giouroukakis, V. (2014). Efferent vs. aesthetic reading. Reading Today, 32(1), 26–27.
3. Naragatti, S., Vadiraja, H. S., & Anburani, S. (2023). The Role of Yoga in Enhancing Student Well-being and Academic Performance: A Comprehensive Review. Journal of Education, Teaching & Innovations Research, 10(10), 1-12. Retrieved from www.jetir.org
4. Rainbow Yoga Training. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.rainbowyogatraining.com/
5. Shanker, S., & Pradhan, B. (2022). Effect of yoga on children with autism spectrum disorder in special schools. Industrial Psychiatry Journal, 31(2), 367–369. https://doi.org/10.4103/ipj.ipj_212_21
6. TED. (2007, January 6). Do schools kill creativity | Sir Ken Robinson [Video]. TED. Retrieved from YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
7. United Nations. (2015).International Day of Yoga. Retrieved from https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n14/689/61/pdf/n1468961.pdf?token=IpjWyBH0nBJjBbk1J3&fe=true
8. Wilson, G. P. (2003). Supporting young children’s thinking through tableau. Language Arts, 80(5), 375–383.
