Week One at Boys and Girls Club

For our civic engagement project I worked with a group of students in our cohort to teach kids at the boys and girls club gymnastics yoga and tai chi. I was specifically in charge of the yoga curriculum. Before our first visit to the club we went through everything we would be doing as if we were doing with the kids to work out any kinks. I think this was very helpful because it allowed us to see what potential problems might be and come up with different solutions for these potential problems. Additionally, this practice helped me to feel less nervous about working with the kids.

We arrived at the boys and girls club about 15 minutes before we planned to start our program (5pm) to be present at the club meeting. During the meeting Daniel introduced us and explained what our activity would be. He said that he wanted at least 5 students to do our activity. We felt that this was probably not the most effective means of introducing our activity, because his request made the program seem less exciting and more like something kid would “have to do”. However, Daniel also pointed out that we had brought a snack for our participants, which immediately seemed to make the activity more appealing to the kids.

When we began our program we had a huge number of kids with us. The group seemed unmanageable in a lot of ways and the situation was, at first, rather over whelming.

We found that Daniel’s advise about a thirty-minute time limit to be very accurate. The kids did seem to have pretty short attention spans and quickly got bored with many of the activities we introduced.

I personally found that being adaptable was the most important thing to making our program work. I had to adapt the way I am used to yoga classes being instructed for the kid to be best able to understand and follow what I was saying. In the yoga classes I attend (and the way I was trained to teach) the instructor simply describes or explains to students what to do for each posture. He or she may demonstrate some aspects, but this is not at all central to the class. This set up allows the instructor to walk around, see how each student is doing, and offer individual help or corrections when necessary. However, when instructing yoga at the boys and girls club I found that it was very important to demonstrate each of the yoga poses and do the poses together with the students. This is in part because the kids aren’t very willing to sit quietly and concentrate on the word you say, when they could be doing something active. Instead, I found the instruction to be most effective when the kids can see what it is they are supposed to be doing. This was a bit of a challenge for me because I had to demonstrate both the posture and breathing while explaining each step and some of the postures leave one a bit short of breath (especially if you are also demonstrating necessary breathing patterns). It seemed to work best if I gave a super-short explanation of the pose, then did my best to describe and demonstrate the pose, and finally if I did each pose and repletion together with the whole group. I found that if I did not do the pose with the students they would not do the pose at all and instead be watching and waiting to follow my lead.

Ultimately what my first session at the boys and girls club taught me was the importance of being flexible when working with kids and, of course, to always have a back up plan or two.