During first week of the training, we were mostly taking in the knowledge and all the fun of being taught yoga as children.
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Yoga is 1% of theory and 99% of practice – said once K. Pattabhi Jois, and now came the time to be more serious about it and practice what we learned.
The day started with group practicum with REAL children. I’ve taught children before, but still was stressed about using my new skills while being observed by the masters of puppets. As the training is organized in close cooperation with Thai Child Development Foundation, we were given an opportunity to teach children the foundation is taking care of. This basically meant they were the children with special needs.
Each of us had to teach for five minutes only, but it wasn’t an easy task as those children don’t speak English, have different types of special needs, and, if it wasn’t hard enough, they were crazy excited about circus coming to the school. How could we compete with something like that?! It’s like performing a support before the concert of one of those big, legendary super groups like Metallica or some pop queen like Beyonce, while being an underground music band of which nobody had heard of. Anyways, we did the best we could. And it had to be good enough as some adults joined us as well. Yey! “We will rock you!” should be our song… okay still not that level, but close!
At the afternoon session we focused on theming and lesson planning. Giving a theme to the class makes it more interesting, but also brings out its educational side. How to choose age appropriate themes, how to plan the classes according to educational philosophies? How to include all aspects of Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences and Reggio Emilia approach? How to physically prepare the class and how to adopt it for all the age groups? Each of us had to come up with activities targeting all types of learners, plan the class for certain age and propose how to adapt it to others students classes for different ages. It was hard work, but actually it really helped us to systematize all that knowledge. Thanks to all that that paper work, we were left with bunch of ready to use lessons plans and the base for preparing final individual practicum. The exam is coming!
P.S. And this is what we had to compete with…