Desks are pushed to the walls and kids are sitting in a circle on the floor. It's not how classes are usually conducted at Audubon Elementary School, but today is a special day.
The school is holding yoga classes for all of its students. In one fourth grade classroom, the lesson starts out with students taking their fingers and digging them into the floor, "plugging" themselves in. Then instructor Rachel Harwood navigates them through different yoga poses, breathing exercises, and positive chants called mantras.
This is the third year the Dubuque Community School District has provided yoga and mindfulness classes to its elementary schools. The goal is to create emotional awareness and positivity.
“What we’d like to help children do is get into the mental and physical habit of calming themselves through their breath work, through positive affirmations that they say to themselves, maybe through a little bit of movement to get the wiggles and jiggles out," Mae Hingtgen, DCSD Behavior and Learning Support Director, said. "We’re helping them to be able to get that energy out, to focus that energy so they really can focus on their school work.”
In the first year of the program, the district provided the class to just four schools, including Kennedy, Sageville, Fulton, and Lincoln. In the second year, it expanded to include seven schools, and this year it's in all elementary schools. The curriculum is developed and provided by Molly Schreiber of
. Schreiber said she's seen how much kids grow from their first year to third.
"Even the skeptical kiddos the first lesson, the first year, year three are our biggest cheerleaders. So it’s really exciting to see the difference between our year one, year two, and year three schools," Schreiber said.
Audubon is in its second year of providing the classes. Student Jaden McLendon said he enjoys the classes and has learned how to calm himself down.
"I just breathe in and breathe out," McLendon said.
"Yoga is really fun," McLendon added. "I wish we could do it more instead of just on one day. And yoga, it calms me down when I’m always frustrated."
The district is also studying the outcomes of these classes. Hingtgen said students fill out a pre- and post-survey each year. She hopes to track growth in students.
"That was our question," Hingtgen said. "Would we see more growth from children who are from lower socio-economic schools or would we see more growth from children from higher [socio-economic schools]?"
This is the district's final year of the study, but Hingtgen said the yoga classes will continue. She'd also like to expand to middle schools. Schreiber hopes to expand too.
"We’ll trickle up into the middle schools and eventually we’ll get to the high schools," Schreiber said. "But, we need to be telling ourselves a different story. We need to change those negative thoughts into positive ones.”
