2nd Year with Yoga and Calm Down Spot Learning

My first year with this learning was good but I did not feel confident in my findings and teaching so I wanted to extend it another year to gain that confidence. My 2nd year with yoga and using the calm down spot blew me away with how awesome it helped my students self-regulate and calm down themselves, independently!! So it may be intimidating to implement yoga and the calm down spot at first, but it is so doable and worth it in the end!!!!

My Why
Finding new ways to help my young learners to self-regulate and calm down independently!

My Process
We visited a school in Des Moines the Spring of 2018. Seeing how yoga and calm down spots are implemented in their building was eye-opening and motivating on how awesome this can be! I took a yoga course that summer. My school year 2018-2019 was a learning year for me. Doing yoga as a person was never a strong suit for me so I fell flat in several areas. However, my second year with yoga (2019-2020 school year) was amazing! I did daily yoga through yoga pose cards, yoga breath cards, yoga songs on YouTube, Cosmic Kids Yoga on YouTube, and connecting literature to yoga! Not only was yoga implemented into our daily routine, I also structured up my calm down spot with yoga poses and breaths for them to use, if they want. I started my year keeping track of who went to the calm down spot and how they were able to calm themselves down. The number of visitors decreased as the year went on as the students were using yoga prior to needing to use the calm down spot. By end of February, I had a student with strong emotions who was self-selecting the calm down spot to help him calm down!! That was huge!!!!!

Yoga

• I started each preschool day with a yoga song or yoga poses depending on our preschool theme.
• For indoor recess, I would use Cosmic Kids Yoga.
• If we need extra learning or support, Cosmic Kids Yoga has specific poses and meditation videos to help our preschoolers understand in a different way. 

Calm Down Spot

• Has a red spot and green spot...red spot is where they go when they first go there and when they feel they are ready to join the group, they move to the green spot
• Zones of Regulation posters to help the kids understand their feelings and why they are there.
• Capturing Kids Hearts 4 questions displayed for the adults to ask before student is able to rejoin, in hopes to help the student process their emotions and choices
• Yoga Poses and Breath Cards on display...we would work on poses and a breath for a week as a whole class, the following week it would go into the calm down spot to help those who need to calm down. 
• The calm down spot for me is a teaching tool and not a punishment and I wanted my students to feel that too so I structured it in a way that it wasn't a cold place to be. 
• Location!!! This is very important. I put my calm down spot so they were removed from the group BUT could still see and hear what was going on so they could still learn from the clam down spot! This was also important to me as a teacher as I could still see what they were doing in case I needed to step in sooner to help or if they were doing a great job of calming down independently. 

My Future

I plan to do exactly what I did this past school year with yoga and the calm down spot for years to come! I will continue to add to my yoga resources to make it fun and exciting for my young learners! For the calm down spot, I will implement fidget toys to find a new way for the students to self-regulate and calm down independently!