Top Tips to Score Well with Your Children Yoga Lesson Plan

I first trained as a Children Yoga Teacher early on in my Yoga Teaching career but one pregnancy leading to another, and a busy Yoga Studio to run, I actually did not start teaching young children until 2014 when my eldest child was 6. By then I had been teaching Baby Yoga for 2 or 3 years and it is likely that this different style of Yoga practice and teaching drew me in.  I have now been teaching Children Yoga in Schools year after year for 8 years and training others for 5. One of the corner stone of our Children Yoga Teacher Training course is our Live Zoom Final Assessment.

This is the final piece that Trainees will have to submit and is done as a 90mins session when trainees get to demonstrate on a 1-1 basis all of the skills they leant to role play their masterpiece of original lesson plan in a live Zoom environment. By then they would have gotten feedback on many pieces of coursework including their original lesson plan and it would be judicious to integrate the feed-back into the final assessment.

So what do I look for when evaluating trainees' Children Yoga lesson plan?

I like to follow a structured assessment grid that is shared with the student at the beginning of the call, once we have had time to catch up. After all, we have grown to know each other well after the multiple assignments and feed-back that have gone back and forth by then. The assessment template or grid is a way to make sure to provide structure and constructed feedback in a positive and unbiased manner, seeking to achieve the best in everyone and making full use of this live time together.

An obvious part of the assessment is of course the sequencing of the lesson plan, noting the timing taken over each section of the lesson plan and adequate use of the Yogamoo sequencing method.  The timing is useful for trainee teachers as they can look back and get to know how much time each section may actually take . This is something that is always tricky as a new  Yoga teacher, ie be able to know how much time dedicate to each section and how much time it actually takes in practice. In addition, I would also be looking how well the warm-ups have been selected in relation to the demand of the key poses in the main section of the class.   Is breathing well instructed to movement? or is it simply compartmented to the ‘breathing' section of the lesson plan? Another areas of assessment might be using safety variations for different ages in the class or more challenging poses can be broken down in simpler poses with easier variations offered first to build upon.  Did the warm up prepare the children well for the dynamic flow in the story or main theme and what kind of transitions are we using to move from the top of the mat to down the mat ?

Another very important section of the assessment is what I call the secondary teaching skills, how the teacher is interacting with the students and what techniques of communication they use, as well as use of language, use of demonstration of poses, use of praise and how this is done.  How direct are they in their address, are they encouraging and suggestive or prescriptive.  Ideally, the style of the class should embody the principles of Yoga as well as be a role model for the values embraced in class. Tone and pace of voice is important when teaching Yoga and these tools should not be ignored in Children Yoga either.

The final section of the assessment concerns the class management skills of the trainee teacher, in particular their ability to set behaviour expectations well and techniques use to hold the group together. Using tips and tricks detailed in their course, trainee teachers will be able to engage students of varied age and abilities, draw them into the practice or Yoga and set them up for success.