indoor / October 4, 2021

Toddler Yoga Activities

What’s inside this article: A quick look at the benefits of yoga for toddlers, and a list of toddler yoga activities you can try with your little one.

Yoga isn’t just for adults! There are many ways yoga can benefit your toddler.

Here’s a few reasons to get your toddler to practice yoga:

Improves Sleep: Stress and overwhelm makes our bodies tense and our minds full, making it hard to fall asleep. This is true for kids, too, even if you think your toddler has nothing to “stress” about. A toddler yoga activity prior to bedtime can improve their sleep.
Lowers Stress: Yoga helps toddlers relieve stress by helping them use their breathing to calm their mind and nervous system. Yoga also helps to relieve tension in the body which can build up when we are stressed.
Physical Benefits: Yoga helps toddlers develop strength and flexibility, body awareness, spatial awareness, balance, and bilateral coordination.
Self Regulation: Emotional self-regulation is the ability to manage your reactions, emotions, and behavior in an acceptable and appropriate way. It’s a skill all toddlers need help learning, as you enter the tantrum filled stage of development where they’re trying to figure out what all of their emotions mean.
Improves Mood: As with any other form of physical activity, yoga helps improve mood by releasing endorphins and reducing cortisol levels in the body. Yoga also gives toddlers a chance to have fun, be silly and playful, in a low demand environment.

Toddler Yoga Activities

Here are some fun and easy toddler yoga activities you can try with your little one today!

Animal Themed Yoga Poses

Try these easy animal-themed yoga poses with your toddler. Use this free printable poster to show them each of the different animal yoga moves.

Make this extra fun by making animal noises to go along with your different poses. This is guaranteed to have your little one laughing.

Cosmic Kids Yoga

Cosmic Kids is a YouTube channel that creates fun, interactive yoga adventures for children. This encourages toddlers and preschoolers to practice yoga and mindfulness from a young age!

There are themed videos for different ages and interests. Here are a few of my favorite toddler yoga videos from Cosmic Kids:

Goodnight Yoga

Goodnight Yoga: A Pose by Pose Bedtime Story is a beautifully illustrated, full-color book that tells the story of the natural world as it closes down for the night, while teaching children a simple flow of yoga postures inspired by their favorite characters from nature.

Yoga Pose Blocks

This is from Alex Kids. There are 24 yoga pose cards in 3 levels of difficulty. Choose 6 cards to place in the pose block and roll both pose and time blocks. Do the pose for the time shown. Can they hold the pose for that long? It’s a game where everyone wins and nobody loses.