Happy Sunday!  My name is Dulsey, and my students call me Miss D.  I’m the lower school yoga teacher.  We are off to a great start in yoga so far.   I wanted to give you an idea of what yoga is like for 5th graders and share some pictures with you.

Yoga starts with a mindfulness worksheet or question of the day. For example, if I posted three emoji’s on the white board and asked them to pick one that describes how they feel, this would be a mindfulness question for the day.  We follow that with “time-in” breath.  So far, we have done feeling breath, dolphin breath and elephant trunk breath.  Each one is designed to get the student actively thinking about their breathing.  This teaches them to rely on the breath when they feel stressed or overwhelmed.

We then do yoga poses.  At the beginning of the year we stick to foundational poses and work our way up as the year progresses.  We finish class with a yoga game and rest.  In these pictures, we are playing a game called Islands and Oceans.  It is much like musical chairs, except we don’t eliminate students, we just eliminate mats and when the music stops, they strike a yoga pose.

Next week we will be working on balance and we will balance rocks to help with the message.