86: Back to School Yoga Tips for Kids: Expert Insights with Alice Blunden

Today host Rachel speaks with returning guest Alice Blunden – a Yoga Medicine Therapeutic Specialist, schoolteacher, and creator of The Yoga Project UK – about accessible ways we can translate yoga tools and techniques for children as they navigate the potentially challenging transition back to school.

In this episode, Alice shares a handful of her favorite techniques that you can teach to children of any age, the essence of which yoga students and teachers will likely find familiar.

Listen in to learn creative yet practical activities that introduce kids to yoga concepts that help increase their capacity for focus, concentration, memory, mindfulness and self-regulation.

“It’s a tool in the back pocket that children can learn, really, from a very young age and it’s teaching them that really valuable lesson of just the power of the breath and how we can calm the nervous system, regulate how we’re feeling, simply through extending the exhalation.” – Alice Blunden

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“If you can learn the skills in low stakes situations, that skillset is much more familiar when the stakes are higher.” – Rachel Land

Show Notes:

“Back to school” can be a big adjustment for children and families [2:38]
Creative activities to introduce yoga concepts and practices to children:
- Focus and memory: What’s on the tray [4:19]
- Concentration and listening skills: Supermarket list [9:34]
- Open sensory awareness: Safari walk [12:56]
- Patience and mindfulness: the Mindful Malteser [20:44]
- Emotional awareness and vocabulary: Paper cup faces [27:37]
- Elongated exhalation for nervous system regulation: Pinwheel breath [33:48]
- Diaphragmatic breathing for nervous system regulation: Teddy bear breath [37:58]
- Breath-focused meditation: High-five breath [40:50]
- Shift in internal state, vagal tone: Humming bee breath [44:49]
Summing up and general advice for teaching children [47:49]
Connecting with Alice, more resources for teaching yoga to children [52:08]