Yoga Animals: A Wild Introduction to Kid-Friendly Poses, by Paige Towler, (Apr. 2020, National Geographic Kids), $16.99, ISBN: 9781426337529
Ages 4-8
What better way to start the day off – or bring it to a gentle close – than with yoga? Nat Geo teamed up with poet Paige Towler to give readers Yoga Animals: A Wild Introduction to Kid-Friendly Poses. Rhyming verses lead readers through a series of animal poses that stretch, balance, and slide them into a zen state of mind. Verses are accompanied by color photos of the animals inspiring the poses, and callouts, artfully placed inside colorful mandalas, walk readers through the pose with a photo and explanatory text. An Animal Yoga Guide at the end provides the Sanskrit names for each pose, photos of a child completing the pose, and a brief, descriptive paragraph about the animal inspiring the pose.
I love doing yoga with kids. I did it when my own were little, and I had a yoga storytime for years at my libraries, where one of my most popular readalouds was You Are a Lion! by Taeeun Yoo; it’s another book that uses animal poses to introduce yoga to kids and will make a nice companion to Yoga Animals. The photos and pose explanations are helpful to illustrate how to achieve the pose, and having photos of animals on the spreads makes a nice correlation between the animal pose and the animal. Let the kids channel their lion or their cat and achieve a nice stretch! There are some very good yoga and meditation books available for younger kids, and yoga may be a nice way to ease some stress and anxiety these days.
Mom Read It 