Jaime's Yoga & Mindfulness for Children

Kids Yoga in Schools – Our 2016 Teacher Survey

In late September 2016, we did a survey of teachers who use Cosmic Kids videos in their classrooms. We wanted to find out how they were using Cosmic Kids and what benefits they were seeing. We got a good response (468 respondents) and have learned a lot from the survey. Thank you so much to everyone who took part! You’ve shared a lot of positive changes in your classrooms, from wellbeing to concentration and in this post we’ll share some of the feedback you gave us and the exciting changes we’ll be making thanks to your input.

Cosmic Kids | Yoga and Mindfulness in Schools

We have noted every piece feedback, from light users as well as heavier users of Cosmic Kids in the classroom. For this analysis (of the impact of Cosmic Kids on students), we are focusing on respondents who use Cosmic Kids at least once a week in their classroom. That’s 372 of the 468 respondents. Teachers who use it less than once a week are also seeing very positive changes but we are most interested in regular use. We picked once a week or more as our measure. This feels about right to us – it means it’s a habit.

The Results

 

Teachers believe overwhelmingly that Cosmic Kids has a positive effect on their students

99.7% of teachers who do Cosmic Kids with their class at least once a week believe it is having a positive effect on the students’ wellbeing. You’d expect this of course – it’s why they’ve made it part of their teaching week – but it’s still good to know!  graph1-2editsource As it happens, the one teacher who didn’t think it was having a positive effect had just started doing Cosmic Kids the previous week and thought it would be wrong to say she’d seen a change. Well said!

Teachers attribute a wide range of positive changes to Cosmic Kids


Cosmic Kids | Yoga and Mindfulness in Schools

We asked about changes in behaviour, ability to focus, empathy & awareness, and strength & balance. Many teachers are seeing some excellent change in their students. A number of teachers said they were unsure if they could attribute change to Cosmic Kids over the other variables at work in their classroom, but many said they were able to attribute change directly to the yoga and mindfulness videos they’d been using in class.

97% of teachers have seen a positive change in students’ behaviour  (51% a marked change)
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96% of teachers have seen a positive change in kids’ ability to focus (51% saw a marked change)graph3editsource


90% have seen a positive change in students’ empathy and awareness (37% saw a marked change)

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97% have seen a positive change in their strength and balance (57% saw a marked change)graph5editsource

Find out here how Cosmic Kids delivers on Government guidelines for physical activity.

Kids who do Cosmic Kids LOVE IT

The good news is that kids appear to love doing Cosmic Kids. We are particularly proud that 94% of teachers said ‘They love it!’

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We need to make some shorter videos!

One of the many inspiring things for us to come out of this survey is the discovery that many of the opportunities to use Cosmic Kids in a teaching day are brief. Many are just transitions between things, a bit of a brain break before doing something else. Many teachers use the full-length episodes we offer for PE and Indoor Recess but thanks to this feedback we are now working on a new series of 5 minute short yoga breaks – called Ready Steady Yoga. This will start appearing on our YouTube channel in January! Subscribe to our Youtube channel if you haven’t already!

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Some teachers have discovered our full range of videos, but quite a large proportion haven’t yet…

A lot of teachers use our Yoga Adventures, and now many have also discovered our Zen Den (mindfulness) series, Peace Out (guided relaxations) series and Namastories (literacy) series. There are still quite a number of people though who haven’t started using our other collections of videos.graph8editsource

We’re working on this, by coming up with ways to share the wider range of videos that we make. One change we’ve already made is on the Watch Page of our website. All of our videos are on there now (not just the yoga adventures; also all Zen Dens, Peace Outs and Namastories.) We’ve also made a handy filter to make it easy to find something that’s right for your teaching need in the moment.

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Cosmic Kids videos are used most often for kids aged up to about 9 years old

Most teachers who responded to the survey are teaching kids from 3 to 9 years old. We’ve also had feedback that kids aged up to about 9 like Cosmic Kids best. After a certain point – perhaps around 9 when some kids can become a bit more self-conscious – the style of our videos can seem ‘babyish’ to some.

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In light of this, a number of teachers of older kids have asked us to do yoga and mindfulness videos for 9-12s. There is more on this below in the Feedback section.

There are some amazing stories about the impact of Cosmic Kids

We also asked for qualitative feedback about how Cosmic Kids is helping kids in the classroom, and we were thrilled to get so many wonderful stories from the teachers who responded. Cosmic Kids is clearly having a huge impact. This is obviously why we do it, but it is still really nice to hear it.

We’ve grouped the stories into themes so you can get a sense of what people are saying. The headlines are written by us, but everything in quotation marks is a quote from a teacher who took the survey.

1. Cosmic Kids gets students moving, because it’s fun.

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2. Cosmic Kids is helpful for teachers because it’s inclusive

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3. Cosmic Kids creates a positive atmosphere in class

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4. Cosmic Kids helps kids become better at self-regulation

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5. Cosmic Kids helps kids focus

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Feedback

We asked for feedback about how we can improve…

There were five common requests. Here’s what they were and what we are going to do about them.

  1. Make shorter episodes – for brain breaks. We are creating a new series called Ready Steady Yoga – 5 minute yoga sessions which are great for in-class transitions. Coming in early 2017.
  2. Make episodes for older kids (9-12s) We are working on this. Please get in touch if you have ideas. In the meantime, we’ve made a collection of kids yoga class plans for older kids here.
  3. Make them slower for younger kids and kids with additional needs. We are incorporating some shorter and steadier episodes in our release schedule. Arnold the Ant is an example of this. We also have a playlist on YouTube of the slower yoga adventures.
  4. Turn off the ads! We now have our ad-free app Cosmic Kids App. For $65 a year, you get ad-free streaming access to all our videos. You can try it free for two weeks. You can also pay to download many of our videos there so you can watch them offline.
  5. Create a set of rewards, and/or a structure so kids can keep track of what videos they’ve done. We are working on this and will keep you posted. In early 2017, we hope to be able to offer a downloadable ‘passport’ in which kids can tick off the episodes they’ve done. Sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Facebook for more info.

That’s it for now. If you’ve read this far I’m seriously impressed! You might even like to look at the full survey results…

The full survey results

See the results of our PARENT Survey


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