Yoga Curriculum

The second grade Yoga and Folk Tales Unit helps students experience the yoga movement tradition to learn the ways it emphasizes health. The 12-week unit instructs students in how to perform animal yoga poses while they hear, read, and discuss Panchatantra tales (fables from India) that go along with these poses. Students build strength, flexibility, and balance as they work individually and in pairs to master different poses. Students strive to execute a variety of poses by name without having the poses visually modeled and to hold each pose for at least 30 seconds. To demonstrate their understanding of this movement tradition, students create their own yoga pose and accompanying story. In a final synthesizing activity, students compare and contrast yoga with their choice of another movement tradition they previously studied: Tibetan Meditation, Qigong or West African Dance.
Class Subjects

Themes

Research Topics

Supplies
Nisha Arya’s book Yoga Tales: Asanas & Animal Fables from India (optional)
Downloads

 

Acknowledgements

Author, Daisy Ling

Second edition Copyright © 2022 by Folk Arts – Cultural Treasures Charter School
First edition Copyright © 2017 by Folk Arts – Cultural Treasures Charter School

This unit was inspired by Nisha Arya’s book Yoga Tales: Asanas & Animal Fables from India (available at Amazon ). Nisha selected a collection of traditional Panchatantra animal fables and connected them to animal yoga poses. The fables are accompanied by fun illustrations of the animals doing their poses. We use this text throughout the unit. Daisy and Nisha developed this unit to use this text throughout the lessons.

***

We invite educators in schools and communities to use the attached curriculum in whole or in part and to modify it to work better for your students. At FACTS we use this unit with second graders (7-8 year olds) but we feel it could easily be used with older children and adapted for use with teens or adults. We invite you to learn more about how this unit was created and our students’ experiences with it by reading an article Folk Arts in the Physical Education Classroom: How Folk Tales Enhance the Cultural Meaning of Yoga written by Nisha Arya and Daisy Ling in the Journal of Folklore and Education Volume 4 (2017) (available for free at https://jfepublications.org/article/folk-tales-yoga). We hope you and your students have as much fun with this unit as we do.

Learn more and find the full curriculum in the downloads section of the sidebar…

 

Girl doing yoga.

FACTS 2nd grade student Franka’s created pose she calls “the flamingo.”