Yoga Teacher - April Merrilee; MA, OTR

After graduating summa cum laude from the Allied Health Department of the Medical School at the University of New Mexico, I began my career as an Occupational Therapist working in adult rehab services. When an opportunity arose 10 years ago to work in the public school system, I went without hesitation and discovered that young children are the ones I love to help the most. My first priority was to "keep everybody safe" in the therapy room, and I felt most comfortable teaching simple yoga poses, breathing and relaxation techniques.

I've been teaching yoga for 15 years and have completed 4 distinct teacher training courses: White Lotus Yoga with Tracey Rich and Ganga White; Integrative Yoga Therapy with Joseph LePage; Pure Yoga with Rod Stryker; and Yoga for the Special Child with Sonia Sumar.

I found that, with the busy school schedule children and teachers have these days, there's a great need for fun, easy and effective techniques that help kids "learn how to learn". This is a key principle in Sensory Integration – which I have studied repeatedly through Continuing Education courses. One day, it dawned on me that yoga itself can be considered a Sensory Integrative therapy approach. So, I set out to justify that statement. I dug out the research on yoga for kids; music and early learning; movement and brain development; and literacy skill building. I included all of this in the SMILY book, along with State Department of Education curriculum standards and benchmarks.  I wanted the use of SMILY as an educational tool to be easily justified for teachers, administrators, parents and therapists.

The fine motor, visual motor and visual perceptual activities are key components of the SMILY Yoga Program. I remember how that idea first came into being about 8 years ago. I had just finished doing a yoga routine with a kindergarten class, complete with final relaxation, and we had a little extra time left. So I had all the kids get paper and pencil, and asked them to copy the stick figure drawings I use to present the poses visually. Well, just drawing them free-hand was too difficult for some of them and I spontaneously created a "dot-to-dot" version for one of the students. He was able to connect the dots and create the drawing! And, he asked me to do another one, obviously enjoying this new found ability. From that simple start came all the curriculum based SMILY activities.

For the past 3 years, I've been offering SMILY workshops to school districts. Please see the Yoga Workshop page for more details. I continue to receive e-mails from OT's, PT's, SLP's and teachers who still do SMILY sessions every week. Therapists and teachers are seeing amazing results and coming up with ever more creative ways of applying the SMILY Yoga program. And, last year I completed my first research study with very positive findings linking SMILY to increased Visual Motor Skills in preschoolers. I’ve also seen SMILY working in the home environment, home schooling and out-patient clinics. My hope at this point is to share the SMILY Kids Yoga Program with as many people as possible, because: it works, and this is FUN!