Kids Yoga Lesson Plan Ideas for

Teaching Gratitude
by Maia Horsager | Nov 8, 2019 | Kid's Yoga | 8 comments
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Is gratitude a part of yoga? Absolutely.

Can you teach kids gratitude with the help of yoga?
I think so.
Many folks who teach kids yoga in the United States use a very secular version of
yoga, focusing mostly on the physical poses and the benefits of the practice as an
exercise.
However, traditional yoga intrinsically has a set of morals that
can inspire us to live a life of gratitude, self-love, and caring for
others (among other things).
Teaching kids yoga in an elementary school, I think a lot about how to use the
principals of yoga to weave into my daily lessons without getting too much into yoga
philosophy.
I need to be careful to keep my teachings secular in my public school, so I stay away
from the phrases “Yamas and Niyamas” and the Eight Limbs of Yoga. (There are
ways to incorporate these ideas and morals though, even in a public school!)
But I still think that it is my job as a teacher of yoga
to help kids learn about some of the more important
morals in these philosophies:
like being kind to others and practicing gratitude.
Kids need to be shown by example and taught directly how to practice gratitude. Many
adults could do with relearning the practice as well. 🙂
 I try to incorporate gratitude activities for
kids in at least two lessons every year,
usually in November around Thanksgiving in
the United States, and at the end of the year.
However, I have been trying very hard to bring more opportunities to discuss and try
gratitude activities in regular lessons, not just planning a whole lesson around the
topic.
Learning how to be grateful is such an important part of learning empathy and
self-love that I think we all need to practice it a little bit more often.
Why is gratitude important?
Well, there are a host of reasons why gratitude is important, and it has been studied
much more in recent years. Some of the benefits that have been shown in these
studies include :
 Improved relationships
 Becoming more generous, helpful, and compassionate
 Feeling less lonely or isolated
 Higher levels of positive emotions like joy, pleasure, and optimism
 Improved sleep
 Lower blood pressure
 Stronger immune systems

for more proof that gratitude

Read this article
can improve your quality of life.
What exactly is gratitude?
I have found that gratitude is so much more than just saying please and thank
you. Those manners-based habits are important, of course, but a truly life changing
sense of gratitude is a culmination of these four things (as summarized in this article
by Andrea Hussong, Greater Good Magazine, 2017):
Notice: What are the things in our lives that we notice and can
be grateful for?
 Think: What do we think are the reasons why we have been
given these things?
Feel: How do we feel about those things that we have been
given in life?
Do: What do we do to share that we are grateful for the things
that we have been given?

So what does this mean?

Gratitude is about paying attention to all that we benefit from in life,
experiencing how it makes us feel, and then sharing that gratitude
with others in order to give back and also to extend our appreciation
for a longer time.
Incorporate gratitude activities for kids in a
yoga and mindfulness lesson plan
How do you encourage kids to notice, think about, feel, and show gratitude on a more
regular basis in yoga lessons?
Here are some ideas of how you can talk about gratitude in your yoga lessons with
kids, some activities for practicing gratitude, and some yoga and mindfulness activities
that go with the theme as well.
Notice Gratitude
What are all the things/people/places/events that we are happy
to have in our lives?
 Make a list as a class of things that you are grateful for
 Create a gratitude collage
 Start a journal or draw some pictures of things you are thankful for, including people
and places
 Thankful ABCs- go around in a circle or popcorn out ideas of something you are
grateful for that start with each letter of the alphabet. Then make up a yoga pose to go
with each item as well! It gets really creative and fun!
 Read a book about gratitude (see below)
Think about Gratitude
Why have we been given these things?
I always tie this in with the “What” portion.
Think and talk about what you have, and where it
comes from, or why you still have it in your life.
Sit in a circle and pass around a talking piece (a ball or stuffed animal). When you get
the talking piece you can share one thing you are grateful for, and why you think you
 have been given it. Make sure you give them “think time” first (or writing time) to
generate their ideas before you start!
 Who gave it to you and why?
 Did you save money to buy it?
 Do your parents work hard so you can have food/a house/clothes/nice things?
 Have you taken good care of it?
 Do you have your friends because YOU are good friend?
 Are you in a great school because YOU work hard?
 Do you have great teachers because they care about kids?

Additionally, books about gratitude often talk about the “why” a

lot, or help us generate ideas about why. Here are some
favorites:
 (I’ve done this as a yoga
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
lesson many times, I’ll write it up soon!)
 The Thankful Book by Todd Parr
 Thanks a Million by Nikki Grimes
 An Awesome Book of Thanks by Dallas Clayton
 Thankful by Eileen Spinelli
 Feel Grateful
Feeling grateful for the things we have in our life and how they have affected us is
where a lot of good yoga poses come in. Most heart opener poses and backbends are
excellent for opening up feelings, but don’t forget to counter them with some forward
folds and poses that open up the upper back.
Yoga Flow for expressing gratitude and
thankfulness
Here is how I would structure a Yoga Flow with extra
backbends.
(To learn more about how to teach a basic Yoga Flow, click
here!)
 Tadasana
 Crescent Moon (both sides)
 Waterfall (a few extra breaths)
 Forward fold
 Table top
 Cow pose–>Cat pose (go back and forth several times)
 Down dog
 Dragon (with extra back bend)–>Monkey (go back and forth several times)
 Table top
 Chaturanga
 Baby Cobra
 Shark pose (reach your hands back behind your lower back and clasp them together
like you have a shark fin)
 Up dog
 Child’s pose
 Table top
 Tiger (from table top, reach one hand forward and one leg straight back, do both sides
for several breaths)
 Camel (hold for several breaths)
 Child’s pose
 Bridge pose
 Wheel pose
 Boat pose (to re-stabilize the core after so many back bends)
 Savasana
Take this Yoga Flow slowly, and make sure to pause to check in how kids
are feeling. Lots of kids LOVE backbends and heart openers, but make sure they
do the forward folds as well.

Why Gratitude Is Good

Need some motivation for practicing gratitude this
Thanksgiving? Robert Emmons, the world's leading
scientific expert on gratitude, reveals why gratitude is good
for our bodies, our minds, and our relationships.
BY ROBERT EMMONS | NOVEMBER 16, 2010
 Bookmark
With Thanksgiving approaching, we’ll all soon be taking time to
acknowledge what we’re grateful for. It’s a nice gesture, of course,
but why do we do it? What good is gratitude?

For more than a decade, I’ve been studying the effects of

gratitude on physical health, on psychological well-being, and on
our relationships with others.
 © digitalskillet

In a series of studies, my colleagues and I have helped people

systematically cultivate gratitude, usually by keeping a “gratitude
journal” in which they regularly record the things for which they’re
grateful. (For a description of this and other ways to cultivate
gratitude, click here.)
Gratitude journals and other gratitude practices often seem so
simple and basic; in our studies, we often have people keep
gratitude journals for just three weeks. And yet the results have
been overwhelming. We’ve studied more than one thousand
people, from ages eight to 80, and found that people who practice
gratitude consistently report a host of benefits:

 MORE ON GRATITUDE

Watch videos of Robert Emmons discussing the power of gratitude.

Check out Emmons' list of "10 Ways to Become More Grateful"--and print it for
your refrigerator!
Read Christine Carter's Raising Happiness post about how to encourage
teenagers to practice gratitude.
 Learn more about the science of gratitude in Emmons' book, Thanks! How the
New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier.

Physical
• Stronger immune systems
• Less bothered by aches and pains
• Lower blood pressure
• Exercise more and take better care of their health
• Sleep longer and feel more refreshed upon waking
Psychological
• Higher levels of positive emotions
• More alert, alive, and awake
• More joy and pleasure
• More optimism and happiness
Social
• More helpful, generous, and compassionate
• More forgiving
• More outgoing
• Feel less lonely and isolated.
The social benefits are especially significant here because, after
all, gratitude is a social emotion. I see it as a relationship-
strengthening emotion because it requires us to see how we’ve
been supported and affirmed by other people.

Indeed, this cuts to very heart of my definition of gratitude, which

has two components. First, it’s an affirmation of goodness. We
affirm that there are good thing in the world, gifts and benefits
we’ve received. This doesn’t mean that life is perfect; it doesn’t
ignore complaints, burdens, and hassles. But when we look at life
as a whole, gratitude encourages us to identify some amount of
goodness in our life.

The second part of gratitude is figuring out where that goodness

comes from. We recognize the sources of this goodness as being
outside of ourselves. It didn’t stem from anything we necessarily
did ourselves in which we might take pride. We can appreciate
positive traits in ourselves, but I think true gratitude involves a
humble dependence on others: We acknowledge that other
people—or even higher powers, if you’re of a spiritual mindset—
gave us many gifts, big and small, to help us achieve the
goodness in our lives.

What good is gratitude?

So what’s really behind our research results—why might gratitude
have these transformative effects on people’s lives?

I think there are several important reasons, but I want to highlight

four in particular.

1. Gratitude allows us to celebrate the present. It magnifies

positive emotions.
Research on emotion shows that positive emotions wear off
quickly. Our emotional systems like newness. They like novelty.
They like change. We adapt to positive life circumstances so that
before too long, the new car, the new spouse, the new house—
they don’t feel so new and exciting anymore.

But gratitude makes us appreciate the value of something, and

when we appreciate the value of something, we extract more
benefits from it; we’re less likely to take it for granted.

In effect, I think gratitude allows us to participate more in life. We

notice the positives more, and that magnifies the pleasures you
get from life. Instead of adapting to goodness, we celebrate
goodness. We spend so much time watching things—movies,
computer screens, sports—but with gratitude we become greater
participants in our lives as opposed to spectators.

2. Gratitude blocks toxic, negative emotions, such as envy,

resentment, regret—emotions that can destroy our happiness.
There’s even recent evidence, including a 2008 study by
psychologist Alex Wood in the Journal of Research in Personality,
showing that gratitude can reduce the frequency and duration of
episodes of depression.
This makes sense: You cannot feel envious and grateful at the
same time. They’re incompatible feelings. If you’re grateful, you
can’t resent someone for having something that you don’t. Those
are very different ways of relating to the world, and sure enough,
research I’ve done with colleagues Michael McCullough and Jo-
Ann Tsang has suggested that people who have high levels of
gratitude have low levels of resentment and envy.

3. Grateful people are more stress resistant. There’s a number

of studies showing that in the face of serious trauma, adversity,
and suffering, if people have a grateful disposition, they’ll recover
more quickly. I believe gratitude gives people a perspective from
which they can interpret negative life events and help them guard
against post-traumatic stress and lasting anxiety.
4. Grateful people have a higher sense of self-worth. I think
that’s because when you’re grateful, you have the sense that
someone else is looking out for you—someone else has provided
for your well-being, or you notice a network of relationships, past
and present, of people who are responsible for helping you get to
where you are right now.
Once you start to recognize the contributions that other people
have made to your life—once you realize that other people have
seen the value in you—you can transform the way you see
yourself.

Challenges to gratitude
Just because gratitude is good doesn’t mean it’s always easy.
Practicing gratitude can be at odds with some deeply ingrained
psychological tendencies.
 © Greg Sargent

One is the “self-serving bias.” That means that when good things
happen to us, we says it’s because of something we did, but when
bad things happen, we blame other people or circumstances.

Gratitude really goes against the self-serving bias because when

we’re grateful, we give credit to other people for our success. We
accomplished some of it ourselves, yes, but we widen our range of
attribution to also say, “Well, my parents gave me this
opportunity.” Or, “I had teachers. I had mentors. I had siblings,
peers—other people assisted me along the way.” That’s very
different from a self-serving bias.

Gratitude also goes against our need to feel in control of our

environment. Sometimes with gratitude you just have to accept life
as it is and be grateful for what you have.

Finally, gratitude contradicts the “just-world” hypothesis, which

says that we get what we deserve in life. Good things happen to
good people, bad things happen to bad people. But it doesn’t
always work out that way, does it? Bad things happen to good
people and vice versa.
With gratitude comes the realization that we get more than we
deserve. I’ll never forget the comment by a man at a talk I gave on
gratitude. “It’s a good thing we don’t get what we deserve,” he
said. “I’m grateful because I get far more than I deserve.”

This goes against a message we get a lot in our contemporary

culture: that we deserve the good fortune that comes our way, that
we’re entitled to it. If you deserve everything, if you’re entitled to
everything, it makes it a lot harder to be grateful for anything.

Cultivating gratitude
Partly because these challenges to gratitude can be so difficult to
overcome, I get asked a lot about how we can go beyond just
occasionally feeling more grateful to actually becoming a more
grateful person.

I detail many steps for cultivating gratitude in my book Thanks!,

and summarize many of them in this Greater Good article. I should
add, though, that despite the fact that I’ve been studying gratitude
for 11 years and know all about it, I still find that I have to put a lot
of conscious effort into practicing gratitude. In fact, my wife says,
“How is it that you’re supposed to be this huge expert on
gratitude? You’re the least grateful person I know!” Well, she has
a point because it’s easy to lapse into the negativity mindset. But
these are some of the specific steps I like to recommend for
overcoming the challenges to gratitude.

First is to keep a gratitude journal, as I’ve had people do in my

experiments. This can mean listing just five things for which you’re
grateful every week. This practice works, I think, because it
consciously, intentionally focuses our attention on developing
more grateful thinking and on eliminating ungrateful thoughts. It
helps guard against taking things for granted; instead, we see gifts
in life as new and exciting. I do believe that people who live a life
of pervasive thankfulness really do experience life differently than
people who cheat themselves out of life by not feeling grateful.
Similarly, another gratitude exercise is to practice counting your
blessings on a regular basis, maybe first thing in the morning,
maybe in the evening. What are you grateful for today? You don’t
have to write them down on paper.

You can also use concrete reminders to practice gratitude, which

can be particularly effective in working with children, who aren’t
abstract thinkers like adults are. For instance, I read about a
woman in Vancouver whose family developed this practice of
putting money in “gratitude jars.” At the end of the day, they
emptied their pockets and put spare change in those jars. They
had a regular reminder, a routine, to get them to focus on
gratitude. Then, when the jar became full, they gave the money in
it to a needy person or a good cause within their community.

Practices like this can not only teach children the importance of
gratitude but can show that gratitude impels people to “pay it
forward”—to give to others in some measure like they themselves
have received.

Finally, I think it’s important to think outside of the box when it

comes to gratitude. Mother Theresa talked about how grateful she
was to the people she was helping, the sick and dying in the
slums of Calcutta, because they enabled her to grow and deepen
her spirituality. That’s a very different way of thinking about
gratitude—gratitude for what we can give as opposed to what we
receive. But that can be a very powerful way, I think, of cultivating
a sense of gratitude

What Parents Neglect to

Teach about Gratitude
 Research suggests that the experience of gratitude has four
parts, but we rarely teach all of them to our kids.
BY ANDREA HUSSONG | NOVEMBER 21, 2017
 Bookmark
Some parenting experiences are nearly universal. The wonder of
an infant’s first smile. The excitement of a toddler’s first wobbly
steps. And the pride in hearing these two words come out of your
child’s mouth without you first having to nudge them along: “Thank
you.”

But what does gratitude mean in children? Most early studies of

children’s gratitude focus on acts of appreciation. For example, in
one classic 1976 study, researchers made audio recordings of
children on their Halloween rounds and found that 11- to 16-year-
olds were four times more likely to say “thanks” for the candy than
six-year-olds.

Today, psychologists studying gratitude note that being grateful

means much more than just saying thank you. Not only is the
experience and expression of gratitude broader than thanking
others but it requires children to use a set of complex socio-
emotional skills. For example, researchers at the University of
North Carolina (UNC) at Greensboro argue that gratitude in
children involves perspective taking and emotional knowledge,
skills that children begin to develop more quickly around ages
three to five.
In the Raising Grateful Children project at UNC Chapel Hill, we’ve
explored gratitude experiences with families as their children have
grown from kindergarteners to young teens. Based on the
scientific literature and our conversations with parents, we’ve
come to think about gratitude as an experience that has four parts:
 What we NOTICE in our lives for which we can be grateful
 How we THINK about why we have been given those things
 How we FEEL about the things we have been given
 What we DO to express appreciation in turn
Older children and adults are more likely to spontaneously engage
in all four parts of gratitude, but younger children may only engage
in some of these parts, only when prompted. Children may show
more gratitude as they gain cognitive skills, collect practice with
those skills, and begin to connect the NOTICE-THINK-FEEL parts
of experiencing gratitude with the DO part of expressing gratitude.

This model emphasizes that gratitude is about how we receive

things in the world as well as how we give to others. Indeed, when
it comes to children, our team expects that helping them learn to
deeply receive things in their lives will help engender genuine
experiences of gratitude. These experiences, in turn, may
motivate the appreciative behaviors that parents want to see in
their children.

How kids learn to give thanks

In addition, the four parts of gratitude give parents several options
for how they can help their children learn about gratitude.

Over a ten-day period, we asked 100 parents to tell us how they

had tried to foster gratitude in their six- to nine-year-old children on
that day. Some of these behaviors focused on how parents
encourage their children to show gratitude, like reminding them to
say thank you or expressing thanks in ways that go beyond words.
The rest of the behaviors focused on what children noticed,
thought about, or felt about things they received.
 MORE ON GRATITUDE IN KIDS

Watch Dr. Andrea Hussong explain how parents can help develop their kids’
gratitude.

Learn seven ways to encourage gratitude in kids.

Discover insights from the book Making Grateful Kids.
How grateful are you? Take our quiz.

What we found is that parents, like the first gratitude researchers,

focused on what children DO to show gratitude. Most parents (85
percent) spurred their children to say thank you and show
gratitude in ways consistent with good manners. A smaller portion
(39 percent) encouraged children to show gratitude in ways that
went beyond good manners. About half of parents said they had
pointed out to their children that they had received something (a
NOTICE behavior). But even fewer parents asked children about
how a gift made them feel (a FEEL behavior reported by only a
third of parents) or why they thought someone had given them a
gift (a THINK behavior reported by 22 percent of parents).

We think children may be understanding what is important about

gratitude based on their parents’ behaviors. These behavioral
messages may in turn shape how children show gratitude.

When parents reported on how often they saw the types of

gratitude in their children using these same daily diaries, what
children DO to show gratitude won out over what they NOTICE-
THINK-FEEL. Almost all parents reported that their children show
well-mannered gratitude (like saying “thank you”) on any given day
of the study, whereas only half said that their children show
gratitude in ways that went beyond “good manners.” Many parents
(over 60 percent) said that their children NOTICE things in their
lives for which they could be grateful or connect positive feelings
to the experience of receiving. Less than half, however, reported
that their children thought about the reasons why someone gave
them a gift in a way that engenders gratitude.

Questions that foster gratitude

These findings suggest that there are opportunities for fostering
gratitude in children that many parents have yet to tap. Finding
ways to help children more deeply notice what they have received
is an important place to start. But helping them make sense of
those gifts, through their thoughts and feelings, may be key to
experiences of gratitude more specifically.

How can parents do that? By asking questions. Here are some

examples of NOTICE-THINK-FEEL-DO questions parents may
ask children about their gratitude experiences.

NOTICE: What have you been given or what do you already have
in your life for which you are grateful? Are there gifts behind the
material gifts for which you are grateful, like someone thinking
about you or caring about you enough to give you the gift?

THINK: Why do you think you received this gift? Do you think you
owe the giver something in return? Do you think you earned the
gift because of something you did yourself? Do you think the gift
was something the giver had to give you? If you answered no to
these questions, then you may be more likely to be grateful.
FEEL: Does it make you feel happy to get this gift? What does
that feel like inside? What about the gift makes you feel happy?
These questions help the child connect their positive feeling to the
gifts that they receive in their lives.

DO: Is there a way you want to show how you feel about this gift?
Does the feeling you have about this gift make you want to share
that feeling by giving something to someone else? Prompting
children after experiences of gratitude in order to motivate acts of
gratitude, whether they be acts of appreciation or paying it
forward, may help children connect their experiences and actions
in the world.
We think that these types of questions may help children to more
deeply receive gifts from others or notice what they already have
in the world. In turn, we think that deeply receiving may motivate
acts of gratitude toward others. And that will give parents reasons
to feel proud of children who not only say thank you unprompted
but, more importantly, mean it.

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About the Author

 
Andrea Hussong
Andrea Hussong is director of the Center for Developmental Science and a
professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She
studies how interactions between parents and kids can foster gratitude.