Yoga+-+Integrating+the+Practice+into+the+Classroom

flat //**As if life isn’t challenging enough already, add acne, peer pressure, and awkward growth spurts to the mix and what you may be left with is a recipe for some serious emotional turbulence. During these critical adolescent years, it is crucial that these adolescents know how to rebalance their minds, bodies, and souls. Incorporating a Yoga practice into their daily lives will be able to help them achieve this goal successfully.**// //**Meagan D'Agostini, Integrating a Yoga practice into the ELA classroom.**// 

=__Yoga: What is it?__ =

Yoga is a practice designed to achieve balance amongst the body, the mind, and the soul. This is accomplished by mastering different breathing techniques, physical poses, and meditative methods. It is a practice that challenges an individual to overcome hardships, both physical and emotional in order to achieve a state of peace. Yoga originated in India more than 5,000 years ago and in recent years has become popular in Western culture. The word Yoga is said to signify “yoke, join, or unite,” and Yoga itself is widely considered a spiritual practice; it has been traditionally taught by Gurus or spiritual teachers.

What is essential to the Yoga practice is its inherent philosophy to develop each individuals maximized potential and access one’s greatest internal strength and wisdom. There are numerous benefits to practicing yoga and some include but are not limited to: improved health, happiness, mental clarity, emotional stability, tranquility, and knowledge.Yoga may be used to both energize the body and to calm the mind.



=__Theoretical Framework: Why Integrate Yoga into the ELA classroom?__ =

There has been much research conducted in the field of yoga in Education. Results have yielded that integrating the Yoga practice into the classroom is extremely beneficial to both students and teachers alike. According to Donna Freeman, a local yoga instructor and author of //Once upon a pose//, “yoga in schools is a really wonderful combination of bringing the health benefits and the intellectual and emotional training into the classroom.” Some of the incredible benefits of an incorporated yoga practice in the classroom include:
 * 1) __**Stress management**__- Teachers can use breathing techniques to effectively reduce stress among his/her students. Learning these techniques is beneficial to reduce performance anxiety which could be especially helpful to students prior to being evaluated.
 * 2) __**Better concentration**__- As students learn to clear their minds of distractions during Yoga, they become better able to focus and maintain focus on tasks at hand post yoga practice. According to Rachael Jefferson-Buchanan in her essay //Yoga in Education, Are we missing out?// “Yoga techniques help to develop the power of concentration, like a muscle, by exercising it. If sufficient concentration can be developed, the brain can pass from the emission of beta waves, associated with the everyday wakeful state and conscious attention, to the emission of alpha waves, associated with passive awareness, a relaxed state of mind and greater receptivity to the learning process. This is when optimum learning can take place.”
 * 3) __**Enhanced creativity**__- This is generally accomplished through visualization which comes hand in hand with yoga. As the student gains a clearer mind state and enters a somewhat meditative state, he or she becomes better able to imagine creative thoughts.
 * 4) __**Heightened receptivity**__- As Yoga aims to rebalance energy levels, students will become more stable, less irritable and in a position to better receive knowledge that is being transmitted to them on behalf of the teacher. According to Sydney Solis, author of //Storytime Yoga: Teaching Yoga to Children Through Story//, "children can verbalize their feelings and images better after a visualization or relaxation."

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Finally, practicing yoga leads to overall better academic achievement! In his article //Academic performance among middle school students after exposure to a relaxation response curriculum,// Benson et al. explores the effect of this type of curriculum on students’: grade point average, work habits, cooperation, and attendance. The findings were remarkable. Benson et al. describe the outcome that students who were exposed to more than two semester long classes in which this type of curriculum was implemented achieved higher grade point averages, had higher work habit and cooperation scores than their fellow students who had two or fewer. Not to mention that results such as these are beneficial to both students and teachers!

“Education is not the amassing of information and its purpose is not mere career hunting. It is a means of developing a fully integrated personality and enabling one to grow effectively into the likeness of the ideal that one has set before oneself. Education is a drawing out from within of the highest and best qualities inherent in the individual. It is training in the art of living.”

—Swami Satyananda Saraswati.

=__Teaching Ideas: How can we integrate Yoga into the ELA classroom?__=

There are many ways to integrate the yoga practice into the classroom as yoga can be useful in various subject areas as well as with any age group! Yoga is centered on principle themes such as: balance, mindfulness, non-violence, unity, and cooperation, so feel liberal to create activities that can be built upon these topics. Yoga can be used as:


 * An ice breaker
 * An introduction to a lesson
 * A break session to rebalance and refocus
 * An essential component in a lesson plan

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">**__Mini lessons (examples)__-**
 * 1) <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">Following the provided link will bring you to an English Language Arts lesson plan that focuses on Reading Comprehension. The article to be handed out to students pertains to the topic of yoga and its many benefits. What I suggest you do to acquire students’ interest is to first begin with a few short yoga postures that the students can take part in. The choice of postures is completely up to you and dependent on the space that you have available, although it may be best to consider the Downward Dog pose as well as the Upward Dog pose considering that they are mentioned in the article. Have students return to their desks where they will read the article, answer comprehensive questions, and finally finish with a brief personal reflection. The article, questions, and reflection components are all provided at the following link from pages 5-11). []
 * 2) Get creative! You can create a scenario involving characters that correspond to yoga poses. For example: Warrior, Dog (downward dog), turtle, moon (half moon), tree, and many more. Divide the class into groups and assign each group one of the abovementioned characters. Instruct the students to concentrate on how their character would think and/or feel being in the scenario. Clearly inform them that they will be asked to retell the scenario from the perspective of their character so to pay attention! Read your scenario aloud while each student assumes the yoga posture that has been assigned to them. Students will be asked to close their eyes and relax, visualize, and concentrate on the scenario. After you have read the scenario a couple of times, lead students into a creative writing activity. Have each student write a short passage recounting the scenario from what they would imagine that his/her character's perspective would be. This activity will help students to understand the concepts of different points of view as well as help their creative minds to blossom!

The above mentioned activities are not only engaging but they guide students towards fulfilling certain specific and overall curriculum expectations within the reading and writing strands. For more specific information regarding these expectations, please consult the Ministry of Education curriculum guide for Grade 8 English at the following link: []



=<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">__Practical resources for teachers: What now?__ = <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">It is possible that some of you have never practised yoga before, well now is the perfect opportunity!
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">If you are thinking of incorporating some yoga postures into a class activity, I highly recommend attending a yoga class beforehand. This is mainly because it is important to maintain correct body posture throughout each pose to ensure safety. There are yoga studios all over most cities and I have provided a website to a highly recommended studio in Ottawa (Moksha Yoga Studio). []
 * If you prefer to teach yourself some yoga postures, this is also possible. There are various online resources that you can consult. Below, you will find a link to a website that will guide you through basic yoga postures. []
 * During a yoga practice, it is often easier to fade out distractions with soothing, relaxing sounds. There are many different sounds that you can choose and the choice is yours. The following link provides meditation music based on different sounds in nature. []
 * To get an even better grasp on the concept of integrating yoga into the education system, I invite you to further read about Micheline Flak, "the President and Founder of Research on Yoga in Education (RYE) and an International Consultant in Educational Sciences." []
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//**Integrating yoga into the ELA classroom is one step closer towards developing mindful, balanced, conscious, and healthy students.** **It is these students' influence on the world that will determine the direction of humanity. Lead the path to peace, love, and harmony.**//



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