Spring Break Challenge Quest: Yoga

Feb 1, 2019

Free

🆓

Byline

Brittany Jacobs, Youth Guide, Naperville Public Library, (Ill.)

Spring Break Challenge Quest was a library district-wide, weeklong drop-in and passive program for students in kindergarten through sixth grade. Held during our schools' spring break, the series involved daily "quests" to challenge the mind and body, from scavenger hunts to binary coding to yoga.

The yoga quest challenged kids to look at printed silhouettes of yoga poses (e.g. child's pose, downward-facing dog) and figure out how to position their bodies into the poses shown.

Advanced Planning

Three Naperville library branches hosted the yoga quest, so the planning team consisted of one representative from each of the three buildings. We set out a few months before our target program date to create a fun passive program that would engage kids on a mental and physical level.

The differing building sizes and configurations were a hurdle that we had to cross, but the quests we selected were pretty adaptable in terms of set-up. Yoga is a very popular activity in Naperville (we have more than 50 yoga studios), so we thought we could give younger kids and families a chance to try out yoga poses in a free and welcoming environment (no yoga pants required!).

Marketing

Our seasonal guide promoted the weeklong event along with a blurb inviting kids to come and test their mind and body with several quests.

Budgeting

This program cost the library nothing. We used materials that we had or were able to create in-house.

Day-of-event Activity

At the time of this program, my building was undergoing a renovation, so we had a large empty space to set up the activity in.

The yoga quest consisted of eight silhouette yoga poses printed out on brightly colored 8.5-by-11 paper and laminated for durability.

The prints were hung in a sequential order, starting with the easier poses, like child's pose or a forward bend, and ending with more complex ones, like tricky balance poses. Part of the challenge was that, with a silhouette, the kids had to figure out how to fold and bend their bodies to match the image without seeing exactly how the arms and legs intertwined.

Program Execution

This was a completely passive program; however, engagement from staff is what kickstarted the participants.

Throughout the day there were less than 10 marked participants, but when I offered to do some of the poses with a few kids, many more people (adults and even teens!) were willing to join in. We went down the row of poses with an added challenge of holding the pose for as long as we could.

A display of yoga books was available nearby, and by the end of the night all of them, along with our DVDs (which we had to pull on the fly), were checked out.

Patrons who had never done yoga before told us they were happy to have been given an opportunity — which demystified it a bit.

While I have since moved on to a position at Anythink Libraries in Colorado, the Spring Break Challenge Quest proved successful and is still being used at Naperville Public Library today. Though no one on staff is a trained yoga instructor, yoga has since been incorporated into several programs offered at NPL.

Advice

Be aware of your teammates and what they feel comfortable participating in. Some may not feel that yoga is within their wheelhouse. If that is the case, perhaps reading a yoga book aloud or pulling up some family-friendly yoga clips may be a better way for them to participate.