Enhancing Intelligence With Kids Yoga Stories

  In the last decade, studies have been conducted that look into the benefits of Yoga; and several have concluded that with regard to children, consistent Yoga practice is linked to improved academic performance, decreased misbehavior, greater physical fitness, and better overall health.


Use in Schools


Some schools, public and private, across the United States, have incorporated kids' Yoga into their curriculum, and still others receive subsidies for offering Yoga classes as part of their physical education programs https://gbcstories.com/. The results are clear; Yoga definitely helps young people focus, feel better about themselves, and behave more appropriately in an academic setting.


Enhancing Intelligence


It must also be noted that Yoga can help enhance children's intelligence. Due to the fact that inversion poses improve blood flow to the brain and change the way a practitioner sees the world while practicing, they stretch and stimulate the mind. Yoga poses also feature relaxation techniques that can halt the onset of anxiety, which is a problem experienced by more and more young people and which can block certain brain cells from functioning. As a result of decreased stress levels and increase circulation, children can be more receptive to learning situations. Young minds are so flexible and resilient, increased learning receptivity will naturally broaden the ability to think outside the box.


Storytelling and Kids' Yoga


To enhance intelligence with Yoga, storytelling is a useful tool that provides a young mind with external stimuli to focus on, while the physical Yoga poses help the child work out excess energy, stress, or other negative emotions. Stories can be told from books, from story boards, or even from memory, as the instructor uses the stories to pace a Yoga asana series and to emphasize certain poses.


In schools, smart teachers can use kids Yoga story time to reinforce their lessons, especially given the enhanced receptivity children have toward learning when they are relaxed. Parents, too, in a family Yoga session, can utilize stories that impart wisdom or moral lessons, to encourage children to grow into kind and wise adults.


Keeping kids Yoga stories creative and fun can also enhance intelligence. One way to do this is to give the class a role in creating the story, by contributing one line at a time, or by giving children responsibility to come up with unique poses to fit the Yoga story's contents. Allowing young people to author their own Yoga practice can be rewarding for them physically, as well as mentally.


Studies have shown that learning through play tends to be most effective when children are free to play without rigorous restrictions and constant supervision. In other words, children can maximize learning through play by utilizing a private space that is away adults' constant gaze. However, such a space poses risks to children's safety when playing outdoors. This could be perceived as negligence with the possibility of legal action taken into consideration.


Children would love to play with natural surroundings and natural materials such as scrap materials. The problem is that the outdoors is a place that has minimal adult supervision. The activities that usually occur during outdoor play allow children to play freely, which can pose a threat for serious and even fatal accidents involving mesh wires or scrap materials among others. Serious accidents such as wires poked into the eyes could scar the child for life. Thus, it is arguable that outdoor play with limited adults supervision might put adults into risks of being taken into legal actions. However, the aim of promoting outdoor play is to allow children to make sense of their world and learn through the environment around them with minimal interference from adults. Video cameras or a 1-way mirror are two non intrusive ways to monitor children's learning through play.


One of the most important pedagogic issues of learning through play is the children's attitudes on free but controlled activities. Play for children means freedom to express themselves. The context of free play strongly emphasized the children's self-activity. Freud (1974) believed that play is the most important way that children could deal with their unconscious emotions. Play allows the child to try out possibilities on overcoming fear and wanting to triumph over evil.


Play provides a particularly rich medium that children could explore and develop social skills and literacy. Children feel free to construct their own social micro worlds during play, although each has its own boundaries. Sutton-Smith (1979) pointed out that Piaget considers play to be pure assimilation that derive its operative function from the child's own actions or mental constructions. Learning through play activities are symbolic processes. They are not subjected to the criterion of objective phenomena in the social world. Play is a kind of mental transformation grounded on the child's subjective view of the world.


Several researchers found that playfulness was one of the traits that distinguish the creative from the less creative children; Wallach & Kogan (1965). Lieberman (1965) used factor analysis to investigate playfulness and found that it was a unitary trait characterized by spontaneity, manifest joy, and sense of humor. Engel (2003) stated that children do explore their spheres of reality and modes of thinking when they tell or write a story. They began learning through play and experiencing their story when they were working their story's content, blending the flow of the story, contrasting, and integrating different spheres of experience.


Vygotsky (1976), another structural developmental theorist, begins a description of play in a similar manner. Vygotsky assumed that play represents the subordination of things to personal meaning. Fein (1979) argued that play from the perspective of Vygotsky, makes a different contribution to cognitive development than it does for Piaget because in play, children act as a model for later abstraction processes.


Sutton-Smith (1979) and Fein (1979) interpreted Piaget's position as a limitation of the child's rational process that contributes little to the advancement of the child's logical thought. Malaguzzi (1998) was critical of Piaget's relative lack of attention to social interaction, the theories distance between thought and language, and overemphasis on what children cannot do. These elements were all embodied in Piaget's concepts of ego-centrism and operations as well as in his treatment of children's classificatory skills. The teachers do need a repertoire of instructional strategies to accommodate children's different ways of learning. The problem with defining learning through play is that it could be chaotic, which makes it difficult for teachers to articulate intentions or predict outcomes.


Outdoor play areas provide children the opportunity to perceive, encounter, and learn managing risk under adult's supervision. It is a place where children could encounter and perform experiments of trial and errors on a series of matters. This helps them develop problem solving and other life skills. Children often imitate the behavior of others while maintaining new ideas to develop further their learning through play. The imaginary play that normally takes place in the outdoor setting actively stimulates the children's imagination, increasing learning through play. This enhances the child's capability to think about things, events, and ideas that are not physically present.


This implies that cognitive thinking development relates to the child's play method particularly flexible thinking and problem-solving skills. In addition, children who engaged in outdoor activities burn more calories than those involved in structural after-school activities such as clubs and tuition's. This explains the other significance of having outdoor activities. Outdoor activities definitely help children to stay fit, healthy, and free from obesity problems. Leading educators, psychologists, and sociologists also acknowledge that children experience learning through play.

Today many children undergo lot of stress related to academics from a very early age. Coping up with the activities, curriculum and relation to the school environment is an everyday challenge. These children have difficulty in following the instructions, or read, write do certain other task related to academics, which in turn hamper their overall development and eventually become a target of peer rejection, leading to low self esteem and shame for oneself. Children undergoing such a situation are the ones having "Learning Difficulties".


Learning Difficulties is generally referred to the chronic difficulties in learning to read, write, spell, or calculate. Though their causes and nature are still not fully understood. Presence of a learning disability does not indicate subnormal intelligence, but it is thought that learning-disabled are neurologically based difficulty in processing language or figures. These difficulties can overcome by special learning strategies or with extra effort and tutoring on the part of parents and teachers. Examples of learning disabilities include difficulty in reading (dyslexia), writing (dysgraphia), and mathematics (dyscalcula). Learning disabilities may be diagnosed through testing, and children may be enrolled in programs offering special help. Children usually show early signs of Learning Difficulties, if these signs are left unrecognized, learning disabilities may result not only in poor classroom performance but also in low self-esteem and disruptive behaviour.


Some of the early symptoms of Learning difficulties are:


* Poor performance in group tests.


* Difficulty discriminating size, shape, color.


* Reversals in writing and reading.


* Slow in completing work.


* Poor organizational skills easily confused by instructions.


* Difficulty with abstract reasoning,sequencing, calculations as well as problem solving.


* Gets distracted easily and is hyperactive.


* Lags in developmental milestones in terms of physical- motor, language, mental and social adjustment.


When considering all the given symptoms, as a parent you should very well know that each child is a different individual. No child will show all the listed symptoms. Some symptoms maybe common as compared to other ones.


You as a Parent should keep in mind certain issues which can help your child to come out of learning difficulty.


* Accept them for what they are according to their age of development and potentials and have a realistic expectations and demands.


* Listen to your children as much as you can. This way you will come to your child's strength and weakness.


* Look for and encourage their strengths, interests, and abilities and overcome their limitations and difficulties.


* Reward them with praise, good words, smiles, and pat on the back as often as you can.


* Involve them in various family activities. Tell them when they misbehave and explain how you feel about their behavior, then let them come up with their own behaviour correction strategy.


* Help them to correct their errors and mistakes by showing or demonstrating what they should do. Do not nag! Nagging will aggravate the problem.


* Give them reasonable chores and a regular family work responsibility whenever possible.


* Provide toys, games, motor activities and opportunities that will stimulate them in their development.


* Read enjoyable stories to them and with them. Encourage them to ask questions, discuss stories, tell the story, and to reread stories.


* Increase their ability to concentrate by reducing distracting objects in the environment around.


* Do not get hung up on traditional school grades! It is important that they progress at their own rates and be rewarded for doing so.


* Take them to libraries and encourage them to select and check out books of interest.


* Help them to develop self-esteem and to compete with self rather than with others.


* Insist that they cooperate socially by playing, helping, and serving others in the family and the community.


* Serve as a model to them by reading and discussing material of personal interest. Share with them some of the things you are reading and doing.


* Consult with teachers or other specialists whenever you feel it to be necessary in order to better understand what might be done to help your child learn.


Children with learning difficulties need lot of love, understanding and patience from parents. Its only you who can help your child to cope up with the situation and overcome their difficulties, hence giving them a wonderful life ahead.


Deepika Haldankar, is a freelance writer, having experience with working with children with different age groups since last 3yrs. She has majored in Human Development and Family Studies, along with Human Resource Management and Guidance and Counseling. She has taken up writing as a hobby as well as one of the source to gain and impart knowledge.








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