With 10-minute yoga breaks, students at Needham Elementary School have the opportunity to calm down and focus before they learn.
During Megan Knartzer’s second grade class at Needham Elementary School, Behavior Interventionist Marni Havener led students through a yoga session. The sessions help students regulate their emotions and teachers say they have caused a marked difference in student behavior since the start of the school year
During one session, students bent one leg and rested it against the other, practicing balance, breathing and focus. One student opened and closed an expandable toy ball to match the timing of students’ breathing as Havener read a passage from a relaxation book. Yoga has helped students self-regulate and get prepared to learn, Knartzer said.
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“It helps you learn more about yourself, to figure out how to manage your emotions and how to maintain a healthy lifestyle,” Knartzer said. “This group is really good at recognizing their emotions and knowing what they need to do to get themselves back into a place for learning.”
Yoga is the latest in a series of social-emotional tools teachers can use to help students who may struggle with behavioral issues. These tools include fidget toys and coloring books, which can also help calm students.
Havener had been practicing yoga for two years before Franklin Community Schools awarded her a 10X Teacher Inspiration grant. The grants give teachers with ideas on how a trip or experience will help improve their ability to work with students the money to do so.
Using the grant, Havener went to a suburb of Portland, Oregon in June. There, she attended a week-long immersion program led by Yoga Calm, an organization that helps educators learn yoga techniques for their students, Havener said.
Havener had practiced yoga with a few Needham students before embarking on her trip to the west coast, but the trip helped her learn how to expand the techniques to more students at the school once the current school year started, she said.
“One of the key things I took away from it was how any person can benefit from it. There are learned skills,” Havener said of Yoga Calm. “It’s learned skills, words, verbiage, how to associate it to kids. If I’m peaceful and calm myself in how to communicate, it works and rubs off on kids and they are calm and peaceful around me.”
Students in Knartzer’s class feel more relaxed after practicing yoga, they said.
“It gets me ready to learn. It helps me stay calm. It helps me not get mad and breathe in and breathe out,” Kenadi Brown said.
“It helps me stay focused and be more relaxed,” Blake Dahmer said.
Yoga, which is also referred to as mindful moments by teachers, also serves as a way for students in gym class to deescalate after physical activity or focus if they’re rowdy after physical activity, gym teacher Linzie Spaulding said.
“We do mindful moments if a class is getting too excited,” Spaulding said. “We do mindful moments at the end of P.E., when they’re all riled up from an awesome P.E. class. They stand tall like a mountain and breathe in, breathe out, trying to calm down their nerves.”
Students who have the most difficulty with emotional control are now able to better regulate their behavior, Principal Dylan Purlee said.
“What I’m noticing with individual students, some students who have trouble doing self-regulation, when I go to support them, they recognize what they need to do, whether it’s slow breathing or thinking for a few minutes to get your thoughts together. You can verbalize and do it,” Purlee said.
“Kids sit down and put their head down in a yoga pose. I’ve seen kids standing in line doing yoga poses; it helps keep them focused.”
