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September 29, 2016. 

"Yoga for Children with Visual and Multiple Impairments." 

Hi, you guys.

Thank you so much for joining us.

This webinar is yoga for children with visual and multiple impairments.

And I hope that you have written down your code 151 to get your credits.

Okay.

So once you've got that code down, let's go ahead and get started.

I have a quick poll question for you, just so I know how much to get into everything and what you guys might need to know, will you let me know how much experience you have with yoga?

If you have none, that's totally great.

If you practice at home or are a yoga teacher even or doing yoga with your students, let me know that too.

My thing is saying that the poll is closed for voting.

Okay.

Good.

Thank you so much for answering.

So it looks like you guys have done some yoga but sparingly.

Cool.

We'll go into a little bit of detail.

Please feel free to let us know if you have questions in the chat.

I may not be able to get to all of the questions.

I may not be able to see them.

There's a lot going in here right now, but I will answer them at the end if I don't answer them while we're going through.

I'll definitely do my best, though.

For those of you guys who are joining us today, one of the major things I want you to learn are what is yoga and also what yoga isn't.

There's a lot of misconceptions out there.

Why yoga is so beneficial and needed for kids with visual and multiple impairments.

And I'm gonna be talking with all kids with visual impairments but I just want you to know it's kids with just visual impairments and kids with visual and multiple impairments as well.

And then you're also going to learn how to implement your first yoga "class," and you'll understand why I put it in quotes as well.

And you are going to be given a yoga consequence derived from the book that was just published by our great organization, TSBVI.

And it has been made specifically for you, for you to be able to do with all of your kids.

There's my kid!

So I am Kassy, for those of you who don't know me.

I'll give a little snippet about myself.

I started off my entire career ‑‑ I graduated high school as a preschool teacher so I have a lot of experience ‑‑ actually, this is probably my only experience working, is with younger kids.

And that's why I started off so I have that background.

I graduated from Florida State with my master's in visual disabilities.

So I have a TVI but not practicing or certified in Texas.

I've been a certified orientation and mobility instructor for at least the past decade.

We're not going to go into that.

So that's my background with kids and kids with visual impairments.

I've been doing this for my entire career, but about, oh, gosh, I can't remember the exact date, probably 2009‑2010, I also became a yoga teacher because I'd been practicing yoga since I was 14 and just felt like the next right step.

So I did that, and it looked wonderful, and I've been teaching yoga all around Austin and I also teach yoga online.

So I have a bunch of different little bits and pieces of experience that I bring in from that.

And I'm also a certified radiant yoga ‑‑ radiant child yoga teacher as well.

That's radiant child yoga.

A practice that we ‑‑ that is great for kids and we a lot of times take that and adapt it for our students here.

We're gonna be talking about that possibly but not really so much.

We're gonna really just focus on the poses for your students.

And most importantly, I am a mom of two.

That is my little baby Roman.

My older one is really hard to photograph.

He's 2‑year‑olds now so you won't see him because they're all blurry pictures if you get what I'm saying.

So let's get into the gist of what we're talking about.

Does anybody have any questions?

Not yet.

Okay.

So what is yoga?

There are a lot of misconceptions about this.

Yoga is the union of your mind and your body and your breath.

What yoga means specifically is two yolk, to unite, you are uniting your body and mind through your breath.

A lot of times in yoga we use the language Sanskrit, and you don't have to use Sanskrit.

I just want you to know you don't have to use that.

We just use it because it's tradition.

Yoga started off ‑‑ I'm just gonna catch up real quick.

Yoga started off simply as meditation and a way for people to find enlightenment and Nirvana and all that good stuff.

But they were really just sitting there, and we brought poses into it to help us sit there.

And I think you guys can kind of understand where they needed that.

And from there, then different lineages and different practices and different people have brought us to where we are today.

And luckily we've been able to take what we see here in America for yoga and make it really applicable for our students.

It's been really good.

So can we go to the next slide, what yoga is not?

Thank you.

What yoga isn't.

For our purposes, yoga is not a spiritual practice.

Yoga is not anything that has to do with religion.

Yoga is simply a form of exercise.

Just like any other form of exercise.

It doesn't include any prayers.

You're not bowing down to anybody.

The most that you're going to honor is yourself and your fellow students.

And your fellow I guess peers when you're doing yoga.

As a form of exercise, there are definite benefits for everybody.

For one, exercise increases oxygenation in your blood.

It helps your blood move better, it helps your circulatory system.

It helps you feel good.

It helps in so many ways.

Like, it increases your strength.

Yoga also lowers your stress levels.

It increases your self‑efficacy skills, and I'll talk a little more about that in a second.

And as with any form of exercise, you're going to get all of the good things that happen with exercise in your yoga practice, even though you're not, like, going out running for a marathon, you're not going out and doing all these big things.

You're going to trigger all those responses in your body and your students are going to trigger all those responses in their bodies to help them feel really good and improve their happiness and their health.

And of course we all know that yoga increases your flexibility as well just because you're stretching.

So for students with visual impairments, yoga is so good, you guys.

First of all, you usually have a space, like a mat, and it's contained.

And our students feel safe in that space.

And they need, as you probably know, our students need direct instruction in so many areas.

And so yoga provides a safe place where ‑‑ for them to have direct instruction.

Yoga, because you're asking them to move in different ways, yoga increases their motor planning and it increases their self‑determination and leadership skills.

This one happens a lot, and it's not something I expected to happen, but all the time.

You will see students ask to show a pose or they will tell you which pose is coming up next once they have the routine down.

And that right there shows that they are stepping out of their comfort zone and they are really taking leadership skills, leadership.

The self‑determination scientifically it's been proven if you do a exercise routine once a week for 12 weeks you will increase your self‑determination, self‑efficacy skills, so there you go.

And of course the O&M person in me loves the fact that it really does help with your motor development, your spatial awareness, proprioceptive awareness and all this understanding of where your body is in space.

Because in order for you to move past that, you have to know where you are right here.

The biggest thing is we can go to the next slide.

Vision is a motor motive.

In college we were told this really interesting story about this little baby.

This is Ro during one of our yoga practices, and, you know, Roman watches me do everything.

He watches me make lunches.

He watches me do yoga.

But he watches me, like, clean the house.

He watches me pour water into a cup.

He watches me do everything.

And he's learning so many different things to do with his body and how hard to push and how it opens and all of those concepts about where things are stored and how to move his body just by watching.

And without that, then we have the student, the next slide is a student who has a visual impairment, and for them, they don't get to watch their mom do everything that she does.

They're not gonna be able to watch thousands upon thousands of times of her opening the fringe or stirring something or moving her body or putting a plate of food down.

How many times have you guys, like, put a plate of food down in front of a student and they had no concept of, like, okay, the food is here, I have to get it to here.

Things like that.

The kids who have ‑‑ who don't have visual impairments can see all of that.

Where our students don't have all of those opportunities of repetition to watch and to learn.

And so what ends up happening, we can go to the next slide.

We're besties.

So motor development has been proven that it starts off the same for kids with visual impairments and for kids who don't have visual impairments.

And only does it start to dip when motor development reaches out further away from the body.

So when you start getting into ‑‑ starting the child needs to begin to roll, the child needs to begin to reach out, that's when the motor development for students with visual impairments is gonna lag.

And then the motor development for typical students will continue along that typical range.

And we don't develop reaching to hearing at the same age as we do reaching to sight.

Also, movement is scary.

And it's not safe.

And they don't necessarily know what's coming up.

So we have all of those things going on.

But the point I want you to take away is that we can get them there.

Because it starts off the same.

It's just the lack of vision as a motor motive and lack of feeling safe and motivation that hinders our students.

So this is where yoga comes in, and it's super wonderful.

You are going to leave here and tomorrow or whenever you can, you are going to start a yoga class.

Okay.

"Class" because it can be ‑‑ it can look like a wide variety of situations.

You can have a one‑on‑one.

You can have you being the teacher with a bunch of different aides.

You can have a bunch of different students in a class, in their classroom.

You might pull them out and go to a different space.

You could just do yoga sitting up and breathing and reaching your arms up or something for a few minutes.

It's going to look so different for everybody.

But I really like the word "class" so we are gonna still call it class because that's what resonates with me.

Just know that it could look so different.

I've had students doing yoga in my office and one on one, which is how it is most of the time, and then I've also pulled an entire group of students and we do it in a gym.

Okay.

So your yoga environment.

These are three areas that you can see I'll describe the pictures that I've done yoga in.

One is my office.

The second one is our OT/PT room.

The third one, I actually got this off the Internet, and unfortunately I forget where I got it from.

But they are in their classroom.

For your students, you're gonna want to make sure that the environment has some things that make it safe for them.

Like you're going to want to make sure that all the clutter is taken out, it's free of obstacles.

You're also gonna want to make sure that the lighting is softer but adequate.

Of course kids with declare, if you're in a room ‑‑ with glare, if you're in a room that has a window, you might want to make sure the window is closed or make sure there's a covering on it.

If you have students with low vision, you might want to make sure there's some light.

If you have students who don't have any vision and that's all that you have, then the lights may not necessarily matter.

You can turn off all the lights and then again the no glare from the windows.

So that's the environment that you're going to go into and then your yoga routine is super important.

Millie Smith has a bunch of different articles on the the TSBVI website.

If you are at all interested about routines.

And routines are really important in yoga.

If you ever go to the yoga class or take a yoga class online, you'll notice that they all have a routine.

There's a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And it's all kind of predictable.

Your routine is going to set the expectation for your student.

It's going to let them know what's coming up so that they can anticipate it, and it's going to allow them to not have to worry about, like, what's coming up?

What are we doing next?

What's expected of me?

They can just focus on learning new skills and focus on the things that are really important instead of, like, I decided to change the yoga pose around or different things like that.

You want to make sure that no matter what is going on in your routine, that the beginning and end are always the same.

I'll say that again on this next slide.

Your general yoga routine, yeah, okay, I just explained that one.

And then your ‑‑ we can go to the next one, your general yoga routine.

The first thing you're going to do for the yoga routine part, you're going to have them focus on their breathing and then you're going to do your movements.

Just like with any exercise you need to warm up the body and you need to warm up the spine.

So you're going to do some seated movements at first.

If you warm up their spine, they can be laying down, but the one that I'm giving you today is seated.

So I find that seated is pretty easy since they're already seated to do the breath work.

And then you're gonna have them come up to standing and do their standing poses.

And then they can come back down to kneeling and then eventually seated and then eventually relaxation, which is laying down.

The last thing that we do is say goodbye.

In yoga we say Namaste.

It's another way we bring in Sanskrit and you don't have to say it in Sanskrit.

You can say it in a different way.

That's totally fine.

But every yoga class will begin with breathing, go to movements, relaxation, and then end up in ‑‑ with you saying goodbye.

But there are also some other expectations that you can ask of your class.

You could have it so that they walk in and the yoga mats are all placed there and all they have to do is sit down and take off their shoes.

Those are fine expectations.

But if your students are ready to move past that or if they come into the situation at a level where they can do more than that, then expect them to, because they can.

Some other expectations for them are when they enter the room, they can store their belongings, put way their cane, put away their backpacks, gather their mat, lay it down, unroll it.

This part they usually need help with if it's a group of mover than one or two students because a lot of times they overlap and they're in different places, but that's totally fine.

And then they can sit down and take off their shoes and then they can place their shoes next to them so that way at the end then they can put their shoes back on.

And then they can roll up their mat and they can put it away and gather their things and then they can live the room.

And it gives them more of those self‑efficacy skills.

It gives them more of the leadership, self‑determination skills and a sense of empowerment and not like it's just somebody else doing things for me.

When you are introducing a movement to a kid with a visual impairment, you're going to use the same levels of assistance that you usually would when you are asking them to do something.

It's really nothing new if you've worked with kids with visual impairments before.

But we'll just go over them.

And in a few minutes you'll see some clips of people in yoga classes, and them actually doing these things.

The first one that you want to try is verbal.

Just give them step by step instructions.

In the yoga book, I give you step by step, word for word, what you can say for each yoga pose.

Today we'll go through it and we'll show clips of me demonstrating it.

But I just don't have enough time to give you every single word.

So you can look it up in your yoga book or ask your friend some time.

If you ‑‑ yeah.

So your levels of assistance.

First you're going to verbal, just give them step by step verbal instructions, for example, "lift your arm above your head."

For this one, when you're going through it with your students, you might want to start with the ground, like what are their legs doing, and then move up.

It seems to really help them feel grounded and understand where they need to be in space so they can build it up.

If they don't get that, and they're all out here, it happens, then you might want to give them a sound queue.

You can bring your hand to tap on the mat or sometimes I tell them I'm gonna snoop they don't think I'm treating them like a dog, snap your fingers above their head and V them bring their hand up to that.

That seems to work really well.

And then the next types are physical modeling.

And so that's where you do the pose.

And then they feel you.

So you will do the pose and then guide them hand under hand to the position of your body parts.

So you might extend your arm out and bring their hand to your arm and say, do you feel how my arm is extended in a straight line out from my body?

So that way they can, like, oh, okay, and then they can feel it.

Then if none of that is working, then you can get in their space and ask them, of course.

But that's when you would use physical assistance and you could move their body.

I highly suggest also using hand under hand for this as well.

And asking if you can touch them so that way you can move their hand to where it needs to be.

Can we go over the slide and then do the clip?

I wasn't sure.

Okay.

Thanks.

So that's basic levels of assistance for all of our students, but different types of students are gonna need different levels of assistance and they're gonna need different types of yoga.

You're not gonna except a 3‑year‑old to sit through an hour‑long yoga class, you know?

With students who have multiple impairments, combine your song ‑‑ combine your movements with songs.

Radiant child yoga is a really good one, karma kids yoga is also another really good one.

You also want your sequence to be really short, seven to ten poses.

And sometimes even seven to ten poses, if you are talking about it, demonstrating it, helping them with it and doing it with a song, that can take up to 30 minutes or more.

So keep it short, especially at first.

And then you're also gonna want to get some adults and maybe some sighted peers to help you.

It's so much more fun when you have a group.

And they seem to get a lot more out of it when they can have people with them as well.

And if you're gonna have a big class, you need more support for kids who have multiple impairments.

Because you're gonna be running around like all crazy and you don't really want that.

You want it to be a fun experience where they can actually get things out of it, so gather some help.

And with young kids, just like with anything, keep it light‑hearted.

Keep it fun.

You can make up your own silly songs if you want to.

Just have a lot of fun.

And you have to be energetic and have a lot of fun, have a lot of excitement in your voice, or else ‑‑ I mean, they might want to do it but they will totally attach to you being excited about it.

So we can show the clip of Carolina and her student doing fly like a butterfly.

Notice everybody in the row.

They're all doing different kinds of levels of assistance.

[¶ Music ¶]

>>Cool.

So in the front they are doing hand under hand and all the way in the back you can see they're actually in chairs.

[¶ Music ¶]

>>She brings her hands up.

¶ Stretch like a butterfly, stretch like a butterfly up so high.

Stretch like a butterfly, stretch like a butterfly, stretch like a butterfly, up so high ¶ ¶  

I love that.

You can see how much help they needed for that class. 

And that's a group, a full class, four kids.  

And they had four adults working one on one with the students.

For students who are higher level, maybe they're middle schoolers or maybe they're high schoolers, you don't necessarily have to have that much help.

As long as they ‑‑ if they have multiple impairments and they're still really into songs and still go with songs and you're gonna need more help.

But if they're older than you might not need as much help.

You can do longer sequences with them, and you can put more emphasis on moving ‑‑ them moving their bodies correctly and the correct yoga poses.

Where with younger kids you just don't ‑‑ that's not the point.

You don't need to focus on them doing it correctly.

For students who are older, you can also have a more traditional looking class, where you have a teacher and then you also have the students that are separated.

So we're gonna show you some clips from a group of students here on our campus that were doing chair yoga.

They did this with a teacher who came in from Austin.

She doesn't teach children with visual impairments.

She's just a yoga teacher.

They were doing this, and I think it worked but it wasn't the best for the students so they've since moved away from this.

But chair yoga is also an option.

I'll let you go ahead and watch this clip.

>>Arms out to the sides and all the way back down alongside your body.

Again, inhale.

Just reaching all the way up.

Great job, Max.

Lift up tall.

Exhale slowly, kind of coordinating your movement with your breath.

And one more time.

We're gonna inhale, lift, reach all the way up.

Everybody keep reaching their arms up towards the ceiling.

Valentine, great job.

Then interlace your fingers if you can and then you're gonna turn the palms to face up.

So you're stretching through the wrist.

You're pressing the palms up towards the ceiling so you feel your spine lengthen upwards.

You bring some space into the spine.

And if you can, just lift gently away from the chairs.

And some of us might come around and help on occasion.

Keep reaching up, pressing up.

Yeah.

And then exhale, gently release the arms to the side.

>>We can add in the clip.

Thank you.

In that clip you saw that our students, she's actually in a wheelchair and she doesn't have that much dexterity in her hands.

And so her physical therapist came and physically helped her.

They have the relationship that they can do that.

And then other teachers came around and helped other students.

We're gonna keep going just to your yoga sequence.

Thank you.

Okay.

So your yoga sequence.

In the book, this is the energizing yoga sequence.

In the book there's also a game that comes with it, and I think there's a couple more poses.

But this one is really good for you to use if you don't really have very many experience with it.

You will definitely be able to see some positive results from using this yoga sequence with your students, like, tomorrow, today if you're really a go‑getter.

So for your yoga class, what it's gonna look like in action.

Prior to the class start, you're going to earn the space, whatever space it is, and I'm gonna say students even though you might only have one ‑‑ and that's totally cool.

You're going to go in and you're going to make sure that the space is set up like the environments we talked about earlier.

You're going to make sure that there's no clutter.

You're going to make sure that everything is safe for them.

If they're doing it in the class, of course, you're not going to move the desks around.

That's okay.

But just make sure that if the students are entering the space, that they can be safe and that they can be as independent as possible.

I also like to have just soft music playing, and you can go to Bensound.com.

I'm sorry this is not anywhere in the notes but I hope you write it down, Bensound.com and you can download free music that doesn't have any lyrics or anything.

And then before your class actually starts, the students will come in.

You'll help them or ask them to store their belongings, gather their things, gather their mat, unroll their mat, and then sit down and be ready for class.

And you can ask them to sit facing the front of the room.

To be honest I usually have to go to the front of the room and be a sound queue, but you can have them face the short side of their mat as opposed to the long sides of their mat.

That might help.

It might end up facing backwards but you can help them.

Okay.

So we're gonna go through your yoga sequence and I'm gonna show you a picture of the pose, and I'll talk about it a little bit.

And then we're gonna cut to a clip and you'll be able to see it in action.

So for breathe, this is gonna begin your routine remember.

This is Millie and she serendipitously wore this awesome shirt that day, so awesome, and she hands her Austin in ‑‑ hands in what we call Namaste pose, it helps kids to feel their breathing because they can feel their sternum.

You can have them put their hands on their knees or somewhere else.

That's fine.

But breathing allows the students to bring their mind to focus on what they're actually doing right now.

Because, remember, we talked about yoga is uniting your mind and your body through your breath.

If they are uncomfortable or if their knees hurt or if, you know, they can ‑‑ you can tell that they're slouching, rounding in their back, have them sit up on something, I like a cushion, or sometimes I'll bring a thick towel from home and that seems to work well.

The first thing that you'll start with in your yoga class is breathing.

Breathing allows your students to fully bring their minds to what they're actually doing.

You're going to come into a seated position, we like to call it crisscross apple sauce and if their hips hurt or knees coming really far up you can put something underneath their hips like a blanket, maybe a pillow.

I also like to use a towel.

Then they can bring their hands to their heart center or just in front of them.

Sometimes we also like to call it the sternum.

And inhale and exhale.

Ha.

Okay.

From breathe, after you breathe a little bit, then you're going to go into your poses.

Like I said you're going to warm up your spine.

One of the ways we really like to do this, I got this one from our great OT/PT group is rock and rolls.

You'll see that in the picture on your handout but also you'll see it in a second.

But this pose helps engage their abdomen and sometimes students can't do this.

That's pretty normal.

You want to help them from behind them instead of from in front of them.

And I also added a little bit of the concept development.

I didn't do that for all of the poses, but you can see the pose in action now.

For rock and rolls, the students are going to begin by laying down.

And then bring their knees into their chess and they can squeeze their knees and then they will rock forward like so.

For the students who have a hard time rocking forward, you want to come around from their back and possibly physically assist them gently up, instead of coming from the front.

Yay.

Okay.

Moving on.

So, again, we're still warming up the spine.

We've warmed up this way.

We're gonna twist in a seated twist pose.

We'll gently warm up their spine.

It also helps them cross midline, which increases the neural activity in their brains, also really awesome.

Again, any times you're in crisscross apple sauce or crisscross yoga sauce, whatever you want to say it, easy pose, have them sit on a cushion or something higher if their hips or knees hurt.

It will show you how you can talk your students into this one.

For seated twist you're going to stay in your easy pose and then have the students lift their left arm up, bring it down behind them, and then their right arm can come up and come on to their left knee.

And then all they have to do is twist over to the left.

Come back to center.

And then we'll repeat that on the opposite side.

As you noticed, I mirrored you guys or my students, but you don't have to do that.

Your kids will catch on.

Mountain pose, I really like adding this pose in there even though sometimes it might feel like a filler, but after doing so much movement and you're really getting into things, it really helps to recenter our students and it gives ‑‑ it gives students a little bit of space, a little bit breathing room to get up into the pose if it takes them a while, especially if you have a group.

Mountain pose starts our standing sequence, and this pose is in this sequence, specifically just to allow your students to stand up, feel their feet firmly planted on the ground, and then they can bring their shoulders on to their backs and allow their senses to really just feel how they feel standing up.

Does anybody have any questions so far?

Seems pretty straightforward.

Now we're getting into the real, like ‑‑ little bit more advanced yoga poses.

This one is moon pose.

It's energizing and helps strengthen your intercostal muscles, breathing muscles, posture, arms, and you're also working on different concepts like up‑down, left to right.

The next pose is moon pose.

From standing, you're just gonna have your students lift their arms up above their heads.

Then their hands can collapse together or glue together and then they lean over to the left, come back to center, and then lean over to the right.

And then come back to center.

And, again, it doesn't necessarily matter how far they reach their arms up.

If they can reach their arms up all the way, that's great.

Encourage that.

If they have a situation like they have CP, then just encouraging them to do as much as they can is wonderful.

Waterfall pose is so fun, but if you have a student who has low blood sugar or high blood pressure or if they get dizzy, then you're definitely gonna want to follow some precautions.

But it's really great for up and down and it is so energizing and it's just a really great way to add some flexibility into their spine.

For waterfall, the student will lift her arms up and then bend forward and reach arms down towards the ground.

And then they will come back up and go back down.

If your student has any problems with blood pressure or gets dizzy, have them go slow or just lift their arms and bring them back down.

Okay.

And then warrior pose.

This pose can be really difficult for students.

I highly suggest having them step forward instead of stepping back when they go into it, but it's ‑‑ it's very grounding because they can feeling their feet on the earth and it strengthens their lower body, but it also lifts them up and helps them feel more energized.

I don't know if you guys are familiar with Ann Cutty's research, she did a Ted Talk about this, but warrior pose is actually a power pose, and if you stand in it for two minutes, which we're not expecting a student to do, but psychologically it will give them more ‑‑ after, it will increase their testosterone, lower cortisol, which is a sign of leaders and leadership.

So you're working on leadership skills.

I'll leave it at that.

Go ahead and watch the video so that way you can see how to really help your students.

Your next pose is warrior one.

For our students I have found that it's a lot easier to have them standing in kind of the middle of the mat and then step forward with 1 foot and lift their arms up.

It doesn't have to be a perfect warrior arm just as long as they get the feeling of it.

Then they'll step their foot back and do the same on the other side.

Great.

So after they do warrior one, then we're starting to come down.

And as you can see, I do this pretty slowly.

I don't just have them go from, like, this big expansive pose to laying down.

You have to bring them back down just like you brought them up.

So we're going into downward facing dog pose.

I love this picture because it shows that pose do's not have to be perfect on the outside.

This girl is getting so much out of this and it is wonderful for her.

Down dog facilitates weight bearing on hands and increases proprioception, but it can be difficult and in the video I'll help you ‑‑ explain how you can help your students with this.

For downward facing dog you always want to have your student start on all fours if this is hard or uncomfortable have them just stay here.

If they're ready to move on, they can flip their tows under and begin to lift their hips up.

It might just look like this for the first few times and then eventually they can begin to lift their hips up and backwards into downward facing dog.

Again because their head is below their heart any time your student has allergies or low blood pressure or just gets dizzy in general you'll want to avoid this pose and just stay on all fours.

Anybody have any questions about that?

Okay.

So we're gonna move on.

So from all fours into down dog.

Then the next pose is cat‑cow and this is both energizing and calming.

As you can see the first picture there's a back bend and then the second picture there's a forward bend in there.

And so it's pretty balancing.

But it is very gentle on the spine.

And it also increases proprioception and helps facilitate weight bearing on hands and more [Indiscernible] up and down.

You know I love sneaking in all those pieces of concept development.

For cat‑cow have your students come into all fours with their hands underneath their shoulders and their knees underneath their hips.

Inhale and they can bring their belly down, look up with their children.

Exhale, round in, and bring their chin in towards their chest.

Continue doing this motion as they inhale and exhale.

For students who have problems with their wrists, they can come on to their fists.

I like to keep the thumb out instead of tucking the thumb under.

Now you'll notice my feet in that one.

You can keep your feet flat or you can put the tops of the toes or bottom of the toes on the ground.

Doesn't really matter.

Just a personal preference.

Then I like to sometimes come into child's pose.

And we're doing this simply because they were already there, basically.

All they have to do is widen their knees, bring their tows together and sit back on their heels, but it just gives them a really good, very calming, very grounding pose, and it really helps with their proprioceptive awareness because there's so much information from the ground.

For child's pose your students are going to come into all fours and bring their knees out wide.

Their toes are going to come together and their hips will sit back on their heels.

If this feels comfortable they can then move their head down to the ground and begin to relax.

Child's pose is very calming.

It will really work to start to bring them back down from all the exercise that they've been doing in their yoga class and get them ready for [Indiscernible].

And that means resting pose, relaxation.

It's a Sanskrit word but in the book we don't use that.

We just use resting pose.

So relaxation is the hardest pose of all.

If you look up in yoga texts it rates all the poses and levels of hardness, difficultness, and this one gets the highest rating because it's so hard.

The whole reason that we've been moving is so that way we can sit or lay down to finally calm our minds.

Keep this time in your yoga class sacred.

You want to make sure that your kids have enough time to actually relax.

So if you only give them two or three minutes they're just going to sitting there, knowing and just waiting.

That they don't have to do it because they don't want to because it's hard.

You can also play really soft music.

I would turn off the lights.

Even if your students don't have light perception, I find that it calms them down more.

Maybe because it calms me down.

I don't know.

But turn off the lights.

Have a soft music without any words.

Allow them to actually relax.

You want them to stay on their backs if at all possible.

And stay here for about at least 5‑10 minutes.

Some teachers also really like to use eye pillows or lotion or lavender lotion or weighted blankets.

Sometimes we'll put a pillow behind the students' necks.

And that's all fine and dandy.

It really helps with the experience.

Just make sure that there aren't any allergies, make sure that your student doesn't have any allergies or aversions and make sure nobody else in the room does either.

Because there's really nothing worse than trying to relax and you smell this smell or you hear this thing and you just can't ‑‑ so here's a video.

>>For relaxation, this is your students are going to lay down on their backs and begin to relax.

Make sure that this pose has at least 5‑10 minutes for their bodies to actually relax.

You can play some very soft music.

Sometimes students like to have a weighted blanket or maybe an eye pillow.

Some students also like to have a lotion or lavender lotion.

Just make sure that there are no allergies in the room with any of the students and make sure you also turn off the lights and allow them to relax.

And then the last thing that you'll do is you'll say goodbye; the students just acknowledge that we have a great class.

You can use the word Namaste, you don't have to use the word Familiar stay.

Sometimes in the kundalini practice, sometimes they do a song, whatever works for you, sometimes they do silly noises, silly sounds.

You can go ahead and play it.

Yoga class, you'll again come into your easy pose, crisscross applesauce, bring your hands to your heart center and we often say the word "Namaste" at the end.

That simply means that I honor and you I'm very thankful that you came to yoga class.

And with anything, there are definitely extra considerations that you need to make.

If this is a new concept for your administration or for the parents, then you have to sell it to them because it really is important and it really does make a difference in these students' lives.

For all the reasons that we talked about but also for life reasons and helping them have something that can really help calm them and use to self‑regulate their behavior.

So you definitely want to get them support from the people around you and make sure that you schedule in some margin time before ‑‑ you have your time during and then a little bit of time before and after so that way you can gather materials, de‑clutter the room and then make sure that you put the room back how you found it and have your student ratios and all of that stuff lined up.

In the next webinars, we will be splitting the two different types of students.

I'm only splitting them into two.

The first one on December 8 is going to be for students with visual and multiple impairments.

These are gonna be your students who are learning curriculums that are more tied to their daily living skills.

They're more motivated by songs and they really like being silly, things like that.

Maybe they have a harder time moving.

That's gonna be that group.

And then the next one on February 23 is going to be all about academic students.

Because it's a whole other ball of wax.

Whole other situation.

And we're gonna talk about how you can incorporate yoga into the academic learning of our students who have to take the state tests and who have to pass all those things and so they don't really have time for any extra things so how can you get that in for them.

And then I now would love to have a Q&A discussion if you had any questions.

But, also, if you have any answers for anybody who happens to type in a question, please feel free to write in your question and write in ‑‑ if you have the answer, if you have the same thing happen, go ahead and write it in there.

Oh, people can speak too?

I'm seeing some things on the screen I don't really understand.

There we go.

So if you're having things come up for you right now where you're like, yeah that would be great, but. . .

Or, oh, yeah my decides would really like that, but. . .

Or if there's a part of this where you can't really see how or why you can make this work for you, let us know.

We've got about seven minutes, not too long, to really help you.

Mm‑hmm.

Totally.

You could definitely do one on one instruction.

But you know what would be really great, Lisa?

Lisa asked ‑‑ I'm sure you can see this but she typically sees students at home and works for a private agency.

Yes, definitely one on one instruction.

But you know what the parents would love?

The parents would love for you to show them how to do this.

So if you can get them involved, that would be really wonderful because who doesn't love more time with their babies.

Oh, yeah, totally.

Include them.

Mm‑hmm.

You can help facilitate their relationship as well.

One way that really works for roll releasing in this manner is doing a yoga story or doing ‑‑ or, like, you write it out.

And if you're in the home ‑‑ are you working with insurance concerns about not being a yoga instructor yourself?

Well, that part I'm not 100% sure, but you're not doing anything ‑‑ like this is not gonna hurt anybody, what we've done.

So you can take the book and ‑‑ or you can take what I've given you, and you can take it to her.

Or if you email me, then you and I can find a sequence that would work really well for the mom.

Yes, mm‑hmm.

Nancy asked, has anybody tried to get the PE teacher on board and do this in the class with peers.

Yes, we definitely have.

We found that that works really well.

When you can include it in their day to day activities, sometimes what we end up doing with that is if the PE teacher already has a set thing that they like to do, then you can ask for maybe ten minutes at the very end for this year and then next year catch them towards, like, in April, contact them, and then see if you can add in more time.

That seems to work really well.

You would think this would fall under O&M practice for ‑‑ Krista works at the School for the Blind in South Carolina so she might have this good answer, would fall under the O&M practices for insurance purposes of body awareness.

That's probably true.

Lisa, you might also want to look at your specific insurance policy and find out exactly.

Because you're not ‑‑ none of this stuff is going to hinder or injure anybody.

>>I have a question about separating [Indiscernible] 

>>I don't separate them by gender.

There's one thing I do for males I'll explain in a second.

And do provide instruction by age groups?

Yeah, I do.

For the same reasons that, like, a 2‑year‑old cannot be in a yoga class with an 8‑year‑old.

They like different things.

My younger kids have much shorter attention span.

You have to be quick.

You have to change it up.

You have to be really fun, really energetic.

But by the time they're 16 if you walk in like this, they're not gonna care.

You have to be on their level.

Older kids will have a longer class.

Younger kids will have a shorter class.

Somebody else had another question.

Oh, boys.

Boys in [Indiscernible] need to be on their backs.

We have found a lot of inappropriate behavior when boys are on their stomachs.

But I don't separate them.

Can we go back to the one above, Tori?

Thank you.

How do you get middle school students to experience the benefit of yoga ‑‑ okay, yes, middle school students are super difficult.

You have to make it super fly and cool.

And I wouldn't include songs.

I would just include ‑‑ I would include a lot of warrior poses, like a lot of strength.

And you might just want to skip the songs.

And you could include more, like, competition in a way, like, okay, we're gonna hold this for three breaths or, like, five breaths.

Can you do it?

That's what I would try with them.

Whatever motivates them, middle schoolers, have them do ‑‑ go that way.

Tori asks if you're just starting in this routine would you recommend starting with only seated kneeling poses closer to the ground or sitting/standing combos.

>>For this one if you're just starting the routine, it depends on the age level of the students, Tori, but this entire sequence you can show and explain and then do, like, the first half and then take out the ‑‑ let's see.

So get up to mountain pose and then do the ones that are easier first.

And maybe skip down dog, maybe skip warrior. 

Maybe for cat‑cow you just come into all fours instead of cat‑cow.

It just depends on how much time you have and the level of your student.

But if you really are struggling with that and you really need some more help, you can email me and we can help figure that out.

Great.

I don't have it.

Here we go.

It's 005.

And then don't forget our next one is on December 8.

From 3:00 to 4:00 central time.

Thank you guys so much for joining us.

Namaste.