FUNdamentals and Building Blocks Therapy is excited to add weekly yoga and bi-weekly music to our summer camp schedule. We have had yoga in the past at summer camp and the kids LOVED it! Yoga has something for everyone and we are always surprised at how well the kids do and how much they enjoy it. As therapists, we often incorporate breathing exercises into our therapy sessions to help with better fluency of speech or to address rate of speech. Breathing can be used as calming and regulatory measure for kids who need to slow down or take a break. We also frequently recommend work on motor planning, core strengthening, sequencing, and memory. Yoga can help our kids (and us adults!) address all of these.
Yoga for kids is becoming more and more popular as a regular activity for kids during the school day, not just as an extracurricular. Schools are seeing the benefits of giving kids a structured break where they get to stretch their muscles, move their bodies, and relax their minds. From the littlest preschoolers practicing “volcano breathing” to teenagers finding inner peace, yoga provides something for everyone. According to the Mayo Clinic, “yoga can calm children, reduce obesity, enhance concentration and help children manage certain health conditions…it may also benefit children who have various mental and physical disabilities”. Yoga programs have even been implemented as a way to address and prevent bullying:
Our camp yoga instructor, Krista Zember, worked with us for 2 summers and despite living a distance away and opening her own yurt in 2012, was thrilled to be asked back to camp. Krista works with adults and both typically developing and special needs children. She is a certified “Yoga for the Special Child” teacher. Please check out her website at www.beyogayurt.com where she describes what her practice involves.
Some other interesting articles on yoga and children are below!
The Benefit of Yoga in U.S. Schools