Snowmen At Night

One of the things I love about my work is the inspiring creative people I get to meet, talk with and learn from every day. We all share, use and adapt ideas to what our children or students are working on at the moment. I LOVE the creative ideas and inspirations I get back! I received an e-mail last week from one such inspiring, energetic teacher.

Her name is Margaret Ricciardone & she has been working with children since 2004. She is a yoga teacher at Ridgewood Montessori in Paramus, NJ.

Margaret has also provided yoga programs for several preschools in the Bergen County area, as well as storytime, art, and cooking classes for the Saddle River Cultural Center. It is her mission to share her love of yoga with children in a warm, fun, non-competitive environment.

As a new mother, she participated in "Mommy and me" yoga classes with her two boys and worked as a co-op mom in their preschool, making her realize that working with children is her heart's desire.

Storytelling is an integral part of Margaret's curriculum and the children use their imaginations & bodies to become an active participant in the story. Margaret wrote to me about one way she creativity engaged the children in the story of  "Snowmen At Night"  and it was so awesome that I wanted to share it with you here:


Hi Barbara,

Just have to tell you, it was a fun class yesterday. Thanks so much for your ideas. Here's what we did:
 We opened with the Namaste song from Storytime Yoga. Then we [warned our hands by rubbing] and woke up our eyes, turned on our ears to listen better, etc. We became sprinklers/fountains, watering the grass and it started to get cold and the water turned to snow. Then we were snowflakes gently falling, then became a blizzard and then freezing rain.

I asked them what they liked to do in the snow and that led of course to our "SNOW-GA Adventure"! (I used Music-'Wipeout' to take them through the activities they were telling me). We then became snowmen. Our snowmen slowly melted and we put them back together using happy baby pose and rolling up and down on our backs to form the snowballs. Then we rested with Snowball Breath by imagining a snowball in our bellies getting bigger and bigger until it was big enough to throw. On the exhale we threw them....and they pummeled me with snowballs!

After that, we dusted ourselves off and read "Snowmen At Night". The children then imagined what snowmen did  and  we played a game where we did what we thought our snowmen do at night... dancing around, sledding, skiiing, etc (to the music of "Squirrels in my Pants"!) When I stopped the music, they had to "freeze". I pretended to be shocked that the snowmen were not as I had left them, commenting on each snowman and sometimes trying to move their frozen limbs. They loved it!
For relaxation, we imagined we were snowmen melting in to the yoga mat. To wake back up again we rebuilt ourselves in our minds.

I was going to have them draw their snowmen, but we ran out of time. I'm saving the "Snowflake Dance" for next time. I used coffee filters to make them (using kids scissors that cut jagged/curvy lines) and they can take them home next week.

PS- I was thinking about "The Mitten" story. If you use a bed sheet as the mitten, when the kids are all in the middle, hand them (or they can grab) a piece of the edge and bring it to the middle and up to their chins to look like they're in a mitten. Then they can give a giant sneeze, jump up and let go of their end. The same for a yoga mat - after they roll up, they can 'sneeze' their way out of it.

Thanks again for all the inspiration/ideas. Yesterday was a blast and I can't wait for next week!

Talk to you soon,


Margaret
 

You don't have to be a very experienced "Yogi" to play & move with kids and teach them in this manner. You can find a qualified children's yoga teacher to present a program for you. In the meantime, you can just grab a book and look around for inspiration! Don't just read a story BE a story!

(Thank you so much Margaret for sharing your fantastic ideas with us! : )
 
To contact Margaret about classes or to read more about her you can find her bio  here at Storytime yoga (under "Find a teacher in NJ"):  http://andyazmi.com/teacher_mRicciardone.html

To order a copy of "Snowmen At Night" click the link.




Contact: barbara@bodylogique.com