Come Play Yoga at the Library!

Hi everyone! Here's what we go up to in our second week of Yoga Storytime at the Lexington Public Library! Take a look at last week's post for information about the parts of our practice that we are repeating each week (welcome song, warm-up song and "Dance for the Sun").

After welcoming everyone with our "Yoga Time" song, we experimented with Bumblebee Breath. To do this, first take a breath in, and then as you breath out, make a BUZZZZ sound, nice and loud. Do this a few times. Then, take a breath in and as you breathe out, make a BUZZZZ sound again, but this time allow your lips to seal together. You should feel a nice tingle in your lips. Try this a few times. Then, take a breath in, BUZZZZ on your breath out with your lips sealed, and bring your hands to cover your ears. You will hear the buzz sound much more strongly inside your head. If you don't like it, that's OK! You can stop anytime. When you are done playing with bumblebee breath, come back to regular breathing.

We warmed up our bodies with a song and then a rhyme that asks us to move first slowly and then quickly:

Slowly, slowly, slowly CLAP your hands.

Quickly, quickly, quickly CLAP your hands.

We followed this with stomp your feet, wiggle your hips, jump up and down, and shake your body.

Time for our first book! You Are a Lion! by Taeeun Yoo. It can be made quite interactive, like a guessing game.

Next we had a "Silly Dance Contest" (from Jim Gill's Moving Rhymes for Modern Times) and read our second book, Silly Suzy Goose.

This book introduces lots of different animal movements that you can link together for a little animal vinyasa: giraffe (upward salute), bat (forward fold), frog (squat), snake (cobra), dog (downward facing dog), elephant (lifting and stomping one leg at a time in tadasana), lion (lion's breath while standing in tadasana).

After all this movement it was getting to be time to cool down, so we did our "Dance for the Sun" and read our final book, It's OK to Be Different by Todd Parr. And of course, a little rest before singing so long.

Thanks for coming to play yoga at the library! Until next time, NAMASTE!