Setting a Strong Foundation...Part II

Setting a Strong Foundation...Part II

In our last blog post, we talked about starting with the basics in a physical yoga practice--optimal positioning of our body in various shapes to maintain healthy alignment and support growth toward more complex asana, or physical poses. Targeting speech and language development in young children is similar in that we need to establish some basic building blocks on which more complex language skills can develop. In this follow-up post, we’ll talk about providing speech therapy through the framework of yoga to address important foundational skills such as vocabulary, motor speech, executive functions, socialization, and literacy.

Vocabulary. There are so many ways that children’s language can be enriched in a yoga class. There are the names of the poses, the labels for the body parts we have to move, and the verbs and spatial concepts that tell us where to put those body parts. We use temporal concepts to describe when we move, attributes to describe how we move, shapes to describe the poses, and numbers to indicate how many times we perform a movement. When we incorporate yoga stories into our practice, the vocabulary we can incorporate into our yoga is limited only by our imagination.

Motor Speech. Motor planning is the brain’s ability to coordinate sequences of movement throughout the body. When we talk about motor speech, we’re talking more specifically about coordinating the movements of the muscles that control speech. In a physical yoga practice there are lots of opportunities for practicing the motor planning needed for fine and gross body movements, but we can also incorporate motor speech planning into telling yoga stories that may guide our practice or mantras and chanting. Children with motor speech impairments can benefit from the multisensory aspects of a yoga practice--auditory, visual, tactile, and/or kinesthetic, as well as frequent repetition and the rhythmic aspects of chanting.

Executive Functions. Executive functioning includes skills like attention, memory planning, organization, and regulation. These types of skills are essential to a child’s functioning day-to-day in their classroom, but often are not explicitly taught. In yoga, we practice bringing attention to small details, such as the inhalation and exhalation of our breath. We practice recall of sequences, such as a Sun Salutation. We use tools like meditation and mindfulness to help calm and regulate our bodies.

Socialization. Ah, socialization. Remember socialization? As adults, we may have a greater understanding, now more than ever due to Covid-19, how much socialization is ingrained in seemingly individual tasks (and how much we may miss seemingly small interactions!). If you are someone that took yoga or exercise classes at gyms or studios prior to Covid-19, you’ll recall exchanging greetings and small talk with the employee checking you in, fellow students, and the teacher. In children’s classes, we also incorporate group and partner poses in which students have to communicate with each other to successfully execute a pose. Even in these times of virtual learning and exercising, there are opportunities for students to communicate with each other and maintain friendships.

Literacy. When we talk about yoga stories, we can mean creating a story to go along with our physical asana poses (such as pretending to plant seeds in uttanasana/forward fold and then reaching up over head to pluck a piece of fruit in urdhva hastasana/upward salute) or creating a yoga sequence to go along with a book. When we incorporate stories and books into our yoga classes, there are countless ways we can target emergent literacy skills in addition to vocabulary that we talked about earlier--phonological awareness, rhyming, and alphabet knowledge to name a few.

Thank you for following along with our two-part series on Setting a Strong Foundation! If you missed our first post, check it out here to see how yoga can be used to target important foundational skills like joint attention, play, turn-taking, breath support. As always, we’d love your feedback--was this information useful to you? Did you learn something new about speech-language therapy and yoga? Is there another topic you’d like us to address in future blog posts? You can reach us at info@soundspeechtherapyandwellness.com.

References:

Longtin, Susan E., and Jessica A. Fitzpatrick. Yoga for Speech-Language Development. London, UK and Phildadelphia, PA: Singing Dragon, 2017.