How to Share Yoga Stories with Kids
One of the first things I learnt about on the children’s yoga training was sharing yoga through stories. Stories are great for engaging children but they also help develop their imagination and language skills, so a triple win! Stories can also be a fantastic way to share some of the more simple yogic values such as kindness or perseverance as many stories already contain moral messages.
Last year I decided to enrol on the Cosmic Kids Children’s Yoga Training as Jamie is the queen of yoga stories online and most of the children who come to my classes have tried her lessons. I have also just taken a further training in EYFS yoga from Beam Academy ( I have been qualified to teach this age group from the start but I am passionate about training from as many different teachers as I can to constantly develop my skills) and there was a large emphasis on yoga stories in this training also.
As yoga stories have very much been on my mind - and make up a section of almost all my regular classes and 1:1s - I thought I would talk about yoga stories for kids today as well as share a story I wrote this week with you all.
So, here are some reasons to include yoga stories in your children’s yoga sessions:
They are fun and engaging
They give children a reason to move into poses
They take off the pressure for poses to be perfect
They are good for language development and usually include plenty of other teaching points such as counting
They are fun for you to teach
So you know why including stories in yoga is a good idea but how do you do it successfully? I have done the hard work for you - writing the stories and listing all the poses and where to share them. I am sharing one I wrote this week below but I have more in my resource subscription. I have also just made my yoga club handbook (containing 12 weeks of yoga lesson plans, stories and games) available to buy individually instead of only being available inside my school subscription. You can purchase it here.
Now you’ve got your plan, what are my top tips for your delivery?
Read the story before hand to get familiar with it (you can keep the plan with you to help during your class, you don’t need to know it by heart
Make sure you know all the poses you will be making and when - in today’s story I have highlighted all the poses to make it easy for you. In my yoga stories to accompany books I tell you which pose to make at each point in the story
Use lots of changes in tone and pitch and use pauses to add effect. Try to make the story really interactive with lots of questions
Don’t be afraid to get creative on the spot - sometimes you need to read the room and adjust your plans, shortening the story or maybe adding in a few of the children’s creative ideas.
Here is a yoga story I wrote this week inspired by different types of transport - something some of the children I teach weekly love. You can download this story as a PDF and access my other yoga stories in my resource bank here.
