The Q & A of play From Chattanooga Parent, Feb/March 2009 issue.
Here’s what you won’t see in Claire Mooney’s “Kids Yoga” class: tidy rows of tykes sitting perfectly still in the lotus position, eyes closed, chanting a mantra.
Here’s what you will see: children pretending to be cows or dogs or cats, singing silly songs or leaning forward, eager to guess what’s on the next page of the book Mooney’s reading aloud. Children touring a farm or taking a plane ride—at least, in their collective imaginations.
“Yoga for kids is absolutely nothing like yoga for adults,” says Mooney, who teaches the class at North Shore Yoga. “I think most parents have the impression that it’s very serious and very still, holding poses for a long time. But kid’s yoga is just way more fun than that.”
The native Brit and mother of two began teaching the class after years of working with kids. Educated in child development and psychology, she has been a nanny, a preschool teacher and a preschool director. Six years ago, as a sideline, she began taking adult yoga classes and “absolutely loved it.” So when she heard about Next Generation Yoga, a program developed solely for children, she was intrigued, traveling to New York City for teacher training.
What she found, she says, was a program offering the same physical and psychological benefits of traditional yoga--strength, flexibility and relaxation—but achieving those ends through play, not lengthy “poses” and meditation. The environment in Mooney’s classroom is anything but the austere scene most people associate, fairly or not, with yoga. “Even though there’s sort of a structure to the class,” she says, “we really can go in any direction that the children want to take us which is limitless. The only limits are their own imaginations!"