Instructor: Carrie Green
Community: Classroom Setting??, Preschool Ages
Plan Creation Date: August 19, 2009
Yoga Calm Principle/Lesson Goal: Listening
Lesson Plan:
Calm
- Belly Breathing – with Hoberman sphere 10 breaths. Shut eyes and listen to stillness. Let each child share how they breathe with “Hoberman”.
- Pinwheel Breath – With our pinwheel in your hand, purse your lips as if whistling or blowing bubbles and blow out to spin the pinwheel. Let each child share how they make the pinwheel spin.
Activate
- Cat/Cow – come on all fours like a cat. Breath out, lower head, look at your belly button and push your back up like scared cat. Breath in, look up and lift head. Your belly will drop like a cow.
- Downward Dog – now that we are on all fours, let’s point our fingers straight ahead and spread them like rays of sun. On the count of three let’s push our “tails” up to the sky. Shake your “tails”, look up at me and then come back down to all fours.
- Tree Pose – Let the wind blow through your branches, then return to stillness-feeling the contrast between windy and still.
- Changing Tree – 4 beats of windy, 4 beats of stillness – Variation: with this age group I have them do this with both feet on the ground.
- Forward Bend – Now let’s bend our trees over and touch the ground. Breathe. Touch toes, and say “Hi toes”. Crawl your fingers up to your knees, and say,”Hi knees,” – Variation: we then touch our bellies, shoulders and head as a way to slowly come from forward bend to standing.
- Volcano Breath – Imagine your breath rising up deep from the earth, like a volcano. Variation: The children like to be in “frog pose” and then shoot their volcano’s up and out with sound effects and all.
- Star – Standing with feet together on the count of three, jump feet wide apart and reach arms out. Spread fingers like rays of the sun.
Calm
- Ask children to lie on back and be very still for 30 seconds. Your bodies need to rest after working so hard.
- Ask students to slowly come up and sit “criss-cross applesauce”.
- We then give ourselves a big hug and say “Thank you body for working so hard”