ASL Animal Yoga
Are you always looking for a way to get students up and moving? Here is a great way to do it while incorporating yoga and vocabulary review into your animal unit. ASL Animal Yoga will help you and your students incorporate movement while allowing you to check for animal vocabulary understanding. Win, Win!
ASL Animal Yoga can help students use kinesthetic learning to retain vocabulary terms. Movement is a learning style that many students taking ASL learn best from. However, we don’t include it in the classroom enough. ASL Animal Yoga can help enhance the learning of our students through movement and language. A huge component of kinesthetic learning is 1) movement and 2) visual stimulus. So let’s get moving and learning.
Creative Lesson Planning
The best way to use this activity is in an animal unit of study, but it can also be a review activity that allows students to start or end a class. ASL Animal Yoga is also a great brain break for the middle of class.
To incorporate this in any animal unit, introduce terms and practice them for a few class meetings. Then choose what animal terms you want to review and include them in yoga poses. A good place to start is with the image below. However, Google “animal yoga” and there are a ton of options and visuals for you to use. Recently I have discovered Kids Yoga Stories and these great cards to use as visuals. Giselle is very helpful and does beautiful work.
Image Credit: Visually
Yoga poses are strongly influenced by animals so yoga and animal terms go hand in hand in the language classroom. Here is the setup for this activity:
Circle Up
Circle students up in the classroom or if it is a nice day, go outside. Go around and have students name an animal. Then make a pose that would resemble that animal. Have each group member join in. Go around until everyone has had a turn to give a “pose.”
Guided Practice and Visual Assessment
Use a series of animal poses to check for student understanding of animal vocabulary. If you don’t have time to teach yoga poses, show an image and let students get into the pose based on a picture you have projected. The image above works well for this or choose one from the Internet like the image to the left.
You sign the animal term like MONKEY and the class can use the image to get into that pose. You can see which students pause or hesitate or even look around before getting into the pose. It is easy to see who knows the terms and who does not know the terms based on quick movement.
Use the following series of poses:
Child’s Pose or “snail”
Cobra Pose
Cat/ Cow
Dolphin
Downward Facing Dog
Ragdoll or “Gorilla”
Dancer or “Flamingo”
Squat or “Frog”
Butterfly
Alternative Idea
This activity, if used with a visual, is a good way to introduce the animal terms. Students can guess the pose based on the sign that you give them.
Another variation is to have students take turns giving an animal sign and the class gets into that pose. Make it a game.
Practicing Classifiers
Another great way to get some fingerspelling and classifier practice is to use the above-mentioned yoga story cards. I print the animals out and how to form the poses. I staple the how to slip to the animal and pose. I print out the animal and the pose for me. Like bingo, I call the animal by signing or fingerspelling the name. The student who has it must explain the pose to the class using classifiers. It is great to see them apply what they know about classifiers in a new context.
Wrapping it Up
In conclusion, incorporating movement with learning will enhance learning while helping students retain information. Use movement with other activities to keep student interest like games, conversations, and videos.
