Where can I teach kids yoga?

Yoga for children has countless benefits. Here are just some of those amazing benefits: it improves strength and flexibility; it increases self-confidence and builds a positive self-image; increases emotional resilience; nourishes creativity; teaches self-acceptance and self-love; builds coordination and balance; expands self-awareness and awareness of others; develops self-discipline and self-control; builds concentration; increases awareness of breathing and deepens the breath; teaches how to relax and reduce stress and, ultimately, how to find inner peace.

By sharing yoga for children in a variety of places, you can bring this amazing practice to those who otherwise might not have discovered it. By bringing yoga to more children, we can help to create a future generation which is more peaceful and more kind, making the world a better place, one child at a time.

So where can you teach kids yoga? Here are some of the best places and ideas as to where you can teach yoga to children:

Teaching kids yoga in daycare centres

It is super fun to teach yoga to toddlers! It is yoga playtime! Sing and laugh a lot and don’t take anything too seriously. With lots of animal poses and some simple games, a 30-45 minutes class is enough; when you see that they are losing focus, start winding things down.

Teaching kids yoga in kindergartens and preschools

Using their wild imagination, take these children on a magical yoga journey with transportation poses (cars, helicopters, airplanes, boats), nature poses (trees, rocks, waves, mountains), animal poses of all kinds (dogs, cats, elephants, monkeys) and even food poses and playground poses.

Slow it all down at the end with some guided imagery so they leave the class all peaceful and calm for their teachers and parents to be impressed by.

Teaching kids yoga in primary schools and high schools

Schools are some of the best places to teach yoga in. It is a great service to the children and a much-needed one, but also a great job opportunity as classes at schools will tend to happen weekly for the whole year, and even many many years to come.

Crafting meaningful classes (often to match, or complement what they are learning at school) we can teach the children life lessons and wisdom.

Do it without long lectures, but more through sharing circles, inspiring poems, movement and social interaction. Let the yoga poses and sequences come in as symbols and analogies of your class topic. All of this while you encourage this more stationary generation to move around a lot, playing and stretching and strengthening through yoga poses.

Teaching kids yoga in community centres

Yoga and its benefits are well known now worldwide, and community centres are a great place to make it all available to a wide-ranged audience. You can offer kids yoga to different age groups or even family yoga for parents and children to attend together. Yoga can be a great social activity, a healthy and positive way to spend quality time together.

Teaching kids yoga in yoga centres

Yoga centres are of course great candidates for yoga for children. All the yoga mums will jump at the opportunity to give their children some education in what they know from their own experience is so beneficial. At a yoga centre you can focus on the more peaceful elements of the practice, letting the space itself help you create the right atmosphere and induce a calming effect on the children.

Teaching kids yoga in gyms

What mum and dad don’t want to stay fit? The issue is finding the time to do it. Kids yoga comes to the rescue! That’s how it works: you take care of the kids teaching them yoga in a fun and engaging way, while the parents get to do their workout. At the gym, you can keep your kids yoga a bit more upbeat and focus on staying mobile and on lots of strengthening.

Teaching kids yoga in hospitals 

Children who are experiencing illness or are recovering from surgery and even children who are facing a frightening and uncertain future can benefit on all levels from yoga. On the physical level, yoga helps children in hospital to stay more mobile. On the emotional level, yoga is uplifting and mood enhancing. There is even research that shows that yoga can help with pain relief. But yoga in the hospital will not look like yoga in the gym. You may need to adjust the practice to be done on a chair or in bed, or even sometimes gently move children who are fatigued or less mobile into yoga poses by actually adjusting them into the pose hands on. If moving through yoga poses is too difficult, you can still practice yogic breathing, relaxation techniques, mindfulness and more. Yoga can benefit anyone, but you have to fit the practice to each individual.

Teaching kids yoga in summer camps and day camps

Summer camps and day camps are always in search of fun activities to keep the children busy. Yoga is perfect for this, and also a great way for the camp’s organisers to market their offerings to parents. Focusing on making yoga social with lots of yoga games, breathing games and mindfulness games, helps the kids experience community while playing and stretching in pairs and groups. It is also fun in these settings to create a yoga performance of some sort to show the whole camp and even parents at a talent show or camp graduation. Yay!