Third Graders Find Flow with Yoga

Jenny Scarborough
Third Graders Find Flow with Yoga

Ocracoke School third graders learned yoga is relaxing and makes you smile.

The class walked down the street to Deepwater Theater on three consecutive Thursdays to learn from Anusara yoga instructor Amy Hilton.  They later wrote journals about what was for most of them their first experience of yoga.

The students enthusiastically recalled some poses they learned:  pigeon, downward dog, plow, plank and wheel.  Hannah Belch said the hardest was "the one where we sat down and put our legs up."

Dylan Esham said that sometimes they held the poses and "sometimes we just do a lot of them,"  flowing from one to another.

Yoga is not supposed to hurt, said Christian Trejo.

Yalena Gonzales said yoga helps relieve stress and is "relaxing."

Alexander O'Neal said he does yoga in the summer when his cousin visits.  He'd like to keep practicing on his own.

Teacher Paige Bennett regularly attends Amy's yoga classes.  "It's been positive for me, and I thought they'd enjoy it," said Paige.  Some of the kids were on the fence about trying something new, but they "all had giant smiles" afterwards.  "It just improved everybody's overall everything.  I wish we could do it everyday," said Paige.

She noticed yoga helped the students be more settled, calm, confident and focused.  They also seemed to have "a different understanding of quiet," after the sessions.

In addition to the poses, Amy said the students really seemed to dig chanting and guided meditations.  "They craved the time to go deeper,"  she said.  Amy appreciates the donation parents put together to thank her for her time, but said seeing the smiles on the young faces was "the perfect reward right there."

For one meditation, Amy asked the students to imagine they were riding on a cloud, then passing through a rainbow, and feeling every color.   Paige told Amy this led to classroom discussions about light and spectrum.

All the students lit up when I asked about yoga, and were even eager to stay after school to talk about it!  To learn more about Amy's classes, please visit her site, yogawithamy.net.



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