Animal Yoga: Spin and imitate!

Yoga is a nice method for children to use their body and relax, connect with themselves and their peers, and improve their fitness, especially when they do not have the space or opportunity to join other physical/sports activities. It also improves focus and attention.

As a facilitator you need to pay attention to the players, on how they perform each pose, as they can hurt themselves in cases of exaggeration or excessive effort. Ideally, a soft ground is preferable, but it is not a prerequisite to perform the activity.

If you want to level up the difficulty of the game, you can use the other circles of the poster (see variations).

This educational poster is part of the ‘Facing trauma - A toolkit on trauma-informed support for children and youth’. This toolkit is a cooperation between StreetSmart, Minor-Ndako, Save the Children Romania & SolidarityNow, cofinanced by the European Union. It provides simple tools to explore important topics like trauma, stress, self-care and emotions in a way that’s easy to use with different target groups.

• On the border of the poster, you can find a breathing exercise that corresponds with the yoga poses. You can use the balloons to guide the inhaling and exhaling of breath. Begin from the bottom left and indicate the balloons with your finger in a clockwise direction, modelling how the players should breathe (deep and slow inhale - hold the breath - slow exhale - hold - repeat). For each step, you can count four balloons (4 for inhaling - 4 to hold - 4 for exhaling – 4 to hold).
• If you would like to level up further, you can play with repetitions. Spin the arrow a second time and look at the number of dots shown in the coloured circle. Then, starting from a standing position with the hands on the side of the body, the players repeat the position, finishing by returning to the starting position and repeating as many times as indicated by the dots.

Learn some yoga poses