4 Tips for Doing Yoga All Year

Yoga is beneficial as a lifelong practice.

How then can we motivate our children to remain invested in a regular, enthusiastic yoga practice?

We can enthuse children by keeping yoga fresh with the seasons. Our Year of Yoga lesson plan unit does just that by bringing the objects we associate with each season to life through gross motor activities, relaxation experiences, breathing, and yoga poses. The illustrations help children understand and connect to what they are seeing in the world outside. We build vocabulary and awareness this way.

Children love to draw from nature and what they observe in the world around them, making seasonal yoga classes a huge hit.

Because children learn from their senses and absorb sensory information from the environment, we incorporate familiar animals and objects that they feel confident and excited when they recognize. We can learn about temperature through opposites such as hot and cold, and later children can understand concepts like warm because they know the opposites. Then, when we pretend to be a melting snowman in the warm sun, everyone can imagine it and have a blast.

We recommend bringing objects from nature to your class or alternatively, bringing you classes to nature when possible, to help children connect the concrete objects with the concepts of the seasons. When children touch cold snow or build a snowman themselves, doing snowman circles we make in yoga make a lot more sense.

That is why we love doing yoga all year round with the children we teach and love. We can continue to draw from the love of nature that children innately have and incorporate the objects we have been talking about to build vocabulary and boost confidence.

A note about the seasons in action:

This summer our founder Lara spent 6 weeks teaching the Summer at the Beach yoga sequence to a group of 2-year-olds that now scream out the names of poses and giggle with familiar joy upon viewing the cards. You may think that repeating the same activities bores children, but the contrary is true for early childhood learners. The familiar becomes beloved. With older students, you can continue to offer them the same pose cards and vary the elements of the class to provide nuanced and novel moments, to continue to draw them in while still building on a routine that is predictable and comfortable for them. You can supplement the lesson plans with other yoga games and relaxations. 

4 Tips from our founder for doing yoga all year:

1. Bring objects from nature to your classes that represent the seasons.For example, bring pinecones and fallen leaves in the autumn. Touch snow in the winter. Bring seashells and sand in the summer. Smell flowers in the spring. 
2. Use illustrated yoga cards that match the objects and concepts of the current season. Check out our yoga cards for fall, winter, spring, and summer.
3. Go on nature walks together. Walk around a flower garden in the springtime. Go on the autumn mindfulness walk. Experience nature together. Name the objects you see. Name the natural phenomenon. “Do you feel the wind on your face? Can you see the green trees blowing in the wind?” Get your free mindfulness walk download here!
4. Build the vocabulary of the seasons! By using the poses illustrated with objects from the season, name each one. As you do the movements, name the poses, and then review them after you are done. Children’s short-term memory is committed to longterm memory this way. By adding movement to the vocabulary lesson, it feels like a special and fun moment rather than an academic lesson.

About the product: Our Year of Yoga Bundle is a big hit among educators and parents alike. It is one of our most popular products, combining 12 lesson plans from the 4 season units in one PDF download. It comes it 21 yoga cards, including 20 poses and 1 breath card. Each season has a lesson plan for ages 2-7, 7-11, and tweens/teens. Save by purchasing this lesson unit!