Yoga for kids – 3 days with Rainbow Kids Yoga

Those of you who have been following my blog will know that I absolutely love to practice yoga with my kids! I’ve written this post on 5 reasons to practice yoga with your kids which is one of my personal favourites. My children have inspired me to take the decision to start teaching yoga to kids and families so last week I took a 3-day course with Rainbow Kids Yoga to qualify as a children’s yoga teacher!

Benefits of Yoga for Kids

Yoga brings enormous benefits to anyone practicing, no matter their age of course. The benefits for children are huge as they are learning in a non-competitive environment many important transferable skills, all by having fun! Some of the benefits and skills are:

• improving strength and flexibility
• increasing self-confidence
• teaching how to relax and reduce stress
• nourishing creativity
• coordination and balance
• self discipline and self control
• developing good postural habits
• building concentration
• encouraging teamwork
• encouraging compassion, generosity and respect

Rainbow Kids Yoga

The course was spread over 3 days (9am – 6pm every day) and included lots of practical advice, how to adapt yoga postures, how to capture kids’ attention and many many fun games! We were encouraged to connect with our inner children for these few days, laugh a lot and have lots of fun! If you think that this sounds all very easy then yes you are right but I was absolutely exhausted at the end of each day because apparently it’s quite hard work being a child and have fun all day!

We ran, we jumped, we sang, we danced and we screamed. We played lots and lots of fun and non-competitive games, learned how to be a lion, a giraffe, a butterfly etc, we had a session on Thai massage and another one on Acro Yoga (acrobatic yoga with a partner) and did lots of creative exercises to learn how to teach yoga to kids.

I am usually not that good with big groups (there were 50 of us) and at first my inner child actually wanted to hide somewhere in a corner and cover my eyes so nobody would see me - especially when being put on the spot to create some exciting moves that everyone has to follow… After the first day, however, my mindset started to change a little bit and on the third day I had certainly embraced my inner child! Don’t think too much, just take everything in, experience, laugh and have fun no matter what is being thrown at you!

I definitely enjoyed every single minute of it and there were many highlights for me. The most memorable, however, was when my daughter and her friend joined us on the course for family yoga!

I’ve met so many amazing people in these three days. We all share a passion for yoga and love working with children but what we learned was that we are all so unique and will all bring something completely different to our classes in the future. This is the beauty of Yoga for Kids in my opinion. You can be creative, bring in your own personality and approach, your own experience and teach the kids something that can shape and transform their lives!

So what’s next? I feel really inspired to start teaching kids as soon as possible so just have to get a venue sorted and then I’m going to start teaching lots of little Yogaberries! I can’t wait!!