July 2002

Teaching Yoga to Kids

By Darlene Paris

When native New Yorker Marsha Wenig moved from California to Indiana with her husband Don thirteen years ago, she suspected that she wouldn’t find any yoga studios near her new Michigan City home. So she and her husband, a longtime yoga teacher, built a yoga studio in their dwelling.

They never expected their home studio to spawn the birth of a yoga center called Dancing Feet Yoga, and they certainly didn’t expect that center to become the headquarters for one of the few school in this country that offers a certification program for teaching yoga to children - YogaKids.

The brainchild of Marsha Wenig, 48, YogaKids is a way of teaching yoga to young people that makes learning traditional hatha yoga fun. “Many of the benefits kids get from learning yoga are the same as they are for adults - increased flexibility, strength, and calmness,” says Wenig who has been practicing yoga for close to twenty years. “My aim in YogaKids is to build self-confidence. I want the kids to feel like ‘Yes, I can do that pose’ I want these classes to foster a feeling of self-empowerment.”

YogaKids is based upon Harvard University educator Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. This theory identifies eight types of intelligences, or different ways in which students learn. They are linguistic, logical/mathematical, visual/spatial, musical, kinesthetic/body, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. Wenig integrates activities that touch upon all of these intelligences in her YogaKids curriculum.

In these classes, yoga is intertwined with reading, writing, storytelling, music, games, and poetry. “The body is used as a vehicle to education,” says Wenig, a mother of two children, Dakota, 13, and Kiva, 11, who also practice yoga. While doing the triangle pose, or trikonasana, children sing a popular nursery rhyme, renamed by Wenig, “0m a Little Teapot.”

Wenig changed the title of the poem and the last line of the rhyme so that students remember how to do the asana. Instead of saying “tip me over, pour me out,” the students sing “tip me over” as they bring one hand down their leg to hold their ankle, “pour me up,” as they raise their opposite hand up toward the sky. “Children learn by linking the new thought to something they already know,” she explains.

“Teaching children yoga is very different from teaching adults,” Wenig says. “I’ve studied many types of yoga where the instructor was dictator-like in their approach. I’m grateful for that style of teaching because I learned a lot about alignment, but with children, it’s different.”

Certified YogaKids Facilitator Eli Johnson admits that before she enrolled in the YogaKids certification program, she taught yoga to children as if they were adults. “Through YogaKids I learned techniques that helped me better reach children. One of my all time favorites is using Beanie Babies to demonstrate asanas. I started collecting the ones that represent different yoga postures. I have a turtle, camel, and dog,” says Johnson, who is also an elementary school teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School.

YogaKids instructors also teach lessons on ecology, anatomy and the natural sciences. Asanas are performed with a reverence for animals and nature, and a recognition of the unity of all living things.

“The poses are fun,” says Certified Yoga Kids Facilitator Linda Troutman, who works with children with special needs as a yoga therapist at a healthcare facility in LaGrange. “We don’t just show the cobra like we do in adult classes. We are the cobra,” explains Troutman who also teaches yoga to elementary school children, teens, and adults.

Students are encouraged to make sounds with the poses, “When we do the snake pose, we hiss. When we do the lion pose, we roar. Then we lead the kids to that meditative place of silence,” Wenig explains.

Designed for students ranging from ages three to fifteen, YogaKids is an approach to teaching yoga that considers the whole child; mind, body, and spirit Teachers are trained to time into the energy of each child in their classroom. Forget about setting rigid classroom rules. “With children, it’s spontaneous,” says Wenig. “It has to flow.

“I want to plant seeds for a lifelong practice,” says Wenig, who developed the curriculum through her ten years of experience assisting educators by using yoga to teach students different subjects in school.

“My intention is to introduce yoga to children in fun, non threatening, yet educational ways. I trust that if children get that kind of introduction to yoga, it will be a part of their life as they get older,” she says.

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