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Yoga Kids a big success at Lloyd
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Neighbors | Sarah Foor .After a successful afternoon of working out their minds and bodies, the Lloyd students showed off their smiles and their personalized yoga mats.
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Alaina Protopapa worked on finding some inner peace during the Yoga Kids event.
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Yoga instructor Dana Pechatsko, who also teaches at Studio Oxygen in Canfield, taught the Lloyd students a fun and laid-back version of the art of yoga during the month-long March Yoga Kids program.
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Ashlyn Juillerat (front) looked like a yoga master, even though she was trying the tree pose for the first time.
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To get ready for some serious yoga exercises, a group of Lloyd students made sure to stretch big to make sure their bodies were ready.
By SARAH FOOR
The yoga class at Lloyd Elementary was far from your typical tranquil setting. But it was effective nevertheless.
Lloyd students were given a new way to test their minds and bodies with the PTA-sponsored Yoga Kids program during the month of March.
During a March 17 yoga class in Lloyd’s all-purpose room, instructor Dana Pechatsko had the students excited to get up and move by mixing yoga with the reading of a book about a rainbow-colored zebra.
The zebra just wanted to look like all of his black-and-white striped friends, but Pechatsko taught the kids that differences are what make each person unique.
“Wouldn’t it be silly if we all looked alike? We are all different and special,” she told the class.
Pechatsko then showed the class yoga poses based on the animals in the book, including slightly modified versions of the lion, monkey, elephant, and downward-facing dog poses.
The kids chimed in to make the noises of the animal they were imitating. Barking like a dog and screeching like a monkey were popular choices for the students.
“I think they’re really having a lot of fun with it,” PTA president Lynn Mickey observed. “Dana [Pechastsko] is great with the kids, and the kids are learning fitness skills without even realizing it.”
The event is project of the PTA’s Health and Safety committee, which has spearheaded Walk-a-thon and IdentiKit activities in previous years. The YogaKids received four yoga lessons for $20, and the PTA provided a personalized yoga mat, water bottle, a T-shirt and post-exercise snack for the students.
Pechatsko, who teaches at Studio Oxygen in Canfield, hoped her classes could help the students consider new things.
“For the kids, I definitely made yoga a bit more silly and fun than it would be normally, but I still think they understood what yoga is all about,” Pechatsko said of her Lloyd students.
“There are times to be loud, but it’s also perfectly OK to have moments of peace and quiet in your mind and body. At the heart of it, I don’t teach much different to my adult classes.”