Paul Bass Photos
Sosensky with tools of the trade: a calming-down kids’ book and a “breathing ball.”
Sherri Sosensky knows little kids get antsy in class. So she figured out how to help them breathe and focus while they learn about the Bible or the Hebrew alphabet.
Sosensky found the answer in yoga. And she shares that answer with kids and families throughout our area.
This fall, Sosensky is teaching a monthly “Joyfully Jewish/ Yoga Yeladim” class at the Jewish Communtiy Center, combining yoga and lessons about religious holidays for 3‑to-8-year-olds and their families. She incorporates yoga into her day job teaching at Temple Beth Shalom’s pre-school. She also teaches teachers — running workshops for area educators, religious and secular, about how to incorporate mindfulness and yoga into their classroom lessons.
Her practice has grown as the need has grown for kids in an ever-connected digital world to stop, breathe, and focus.
“They’re even going to bed with these bright-blue screens by their faces,” Sosensky noted during an appearance on WNHH radio’s “Chai Haven” program.
She spoke on the program about how she began practicing yoga around 15 years ago, while her two daughters and husband played ice hockey at Hamden’s rink. “While my daughters and husband were gliding on the ice, I was in the studio,” she recalled, chanting “Om.”
Yoga and then “mindfulness” swept the country in the intervening years as our lives grew more cluttered.
Sosensky gradually introduced yoga techniques to help her young children pause and focus in her pre-school and afternoon Hebrew school classrooms at Beth Shalom. Meanwhile, she trained first at New Haven’s Full of Joy Yoga, then for certification from an international company called “Kidding Around Yoga” (founded by Haris Lender, daughter of the late New Haven bagel entrepreneur Murray Lender).
She brought two of her many teaching props to the interview to demonstrate some of her techniques. She took out a “breathing ball,” a.k.a. a “Hoberman sphere”: a plastic contraption that students expand and extract along with their breaths as they perform a “sun salutation.”
She struck a set of “ting-sha bells” at just the right spot to elicit an echoing, peaceful note to focus attention.
She also described how she ties yoga to Biblical lessons. For instance, when she teaches kids about “Bereshit,” the opening part of the Book of Genesis in which God creates the world, she has the kids strike a pose to coincide with each day of creation. To mark the creation of fish, the kids lie on their backs with palms under their spine and then lift up their heart and chest to “swim.” They strike a tree pose for the creation of trees. They strike sunrise and sunset poses for the beginning and end of the day.
She also matches yoga poses to the letters of the Hebrew aleph-bet. So the kids can get out of their chairs and become, say, a dalet. On a holiday like Chanukah, she’ll have children strike an eagle pose and spin like dreidels. No matter what the day, the kids will be stretching — their bodies, and their consciousness.
Click on or download the above sound file to listen to the full interview with Sosensky on WNHH radio’s “Chai Haven” program.
And click here and here to find out more about her and her programs.