I LOVE yoga and I LOVE children’s books.
.
When both of them come together, I cannot be the posture-holding, slow breathing yogi.
As the book explains in it’s foreword…”You can practice asanas in many ways-by moving fast, or taking it slow or by just staying in your posture…”.
Yoga and children’s book, together make me really excited.
Books that encourage participation through movement make me particularly excited.
GROWING WITH YOGA does just that, as it takes me back to moving through Eric Carle ‘s 'From Head to Toe' and Micheal Rosen‘s We’re going on a Bear Hunt.
Rhythmic text accompanied by beautiful atmospheric illustrations welcome the youngest reader to explore a few of the yoga asanas.
Each posture is featured with an illustration of a child in that posture, accompanied by an illustration of the animal from which it derives its name…helping children connect the pose with the animal and thereby its etymology. The how-to of each pose is explained at the end of the book.
A wonderful addition to the youngest child’s bookshelf and given how beneficial yoga is…to their life, as well.
The authors Rama and Aditi Chandrasekhar are both yoga practitioners and have drawn from their experience teaching yoga to both adults and children to create this book.
Nivedita Subramanium is a writer, illustrator and researcher and someone whose wonderful posts on children’s books, I look forward to and treasure.
I practice yoga regularly and so I couldn’t help going through the poses mentally.
While I get that the idea was to align the poses with the animals they draw their names from, as a hands-on library educator, I couldn’t help but wish that the sequence of poses, from page to page, flowed in a way that would make it easy to ‘do along’ in a sequential manner.
Yet, this personal preference does not take away from the joy this book is bound to bring as children move their way through it.
