The benefits of relaxation sessions for kids are becoming widely acknowledged and on our shelves you’ll find two handy kits to teach you the basics of yoga for kids, produced by Melbourne’s Edna Reinhardt. Here’s Edna’s guide to getting started.

Yoga cards for kids are an innovation designed to help you and your child discover yoga together. They are tactile, inventive and fun and using them couldn’t be more simple. You get down on the floor with your child, spread the cards out, select a card and try to copy the child on the card. The beauty of these games is that, unless you are a yoga athlete, this is one thing that your kids are likely to be better at than you!

Children are naturally very supple. The younger they are, the more supple they are and therefore the more adept at yoga, which is a great thing. Can you touch your head to your toes in the starfish? Chances are that your kid can.

A word of advice before you begin: don’t feel that you need to correct your kids. If you want them to see how it’s done, quietly do it yourself. They will be watching you.

There are a number of games you can play using the kits. Here’s how you could narrate a session, guiding your children: How many reptiles can you find in this set of cards? I can find a crocodile, a lizard and a cobra. Can you move smoothly from a crocodile to a cobra? How many birds can you find? I can find a seagull, an emu, a sparrow and a sitting eagle. The emu is easy. We can all do that one. But how would we go with the sitting eagle? It’s an asymmetrical posture and really challenges our awareness of left and right side.

You could then ask your child to look for five yoga cards in the kit that capture their imagination. What about sideways tree, candlestick, stumpy tailed crocodile, hunting dog and gate? A good game would be to put them into a sequence and tell a story about them.

Alternatively, if you show your child some cards and then take the cards away, can they memorize the order of the six-posture sequence? How long a sequence can they remember? Ideas for sessions will soon come to you.

When you add music, the lines between a yoga sequence and dance become blurred. Putting those sequences together in new and creative ways adds another dimension to these activities.Three quirky pieces of music by Australian composers that work well with yoga sequencing are ‘Summer rain’ by Riley Lee, ‘The Enormous Club’ by Cosmo Cosmolino and ‘Malignant Humour’ by David Chesworth, but I’m sure you’ll find other pieces that work for you.

Yoga is just a way of encouraging kids to have a happy relationship with their bodies. It’s non-competitive and it’s fun. Kids can do it alone but it’s also a great activity to take part in together. Kids love to be witnessed. Maybe they can even teach you something.

Edna Reinhardt is the principal at