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Teacher Lynn Bizzi leads toddlers through 'floppy' yoga.
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Mary Pierson leads the youngsters in a singalong.
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Pine Cobble Program Offers Yoga to Youngsters

By Stephen DravisWilliamstown Correspondent
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Toddlers have been learning movement and breathing through yoga at Pine Cobble School.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — It may be more about motor skills than meditation, but a new yoga program at Pine Cobble School this winter is helping introduce preschoolers to a life skill they may find handy in years to come.

"The program has yoga elements and different movements that come from advanced yoga," said Pine Cobble teacher Lynn Bizzi, who instituted the six-week free "Beginnings: Yoga/Music" program in early January.

"It helps the little ones with spatial awareness of their body in proximity to other children and teaches great tools to self-regulate and relax."

Bizzi said she has used yoga in her preschool classroom for about five years. This winter, she has been offereing the same lessons to toddlers, with caregivers, on Wednesday mornings through Feb. 20.

Bizzi uses puppets and simple stories to help engage the children, who act out the roles of characters in those stories by adopting poses modeled on traditional yoga movements. The class is joined by another member of the Pine Cobble faculty, Mary Pierson, who plays guitar and leads the youngsters in a singalong.

"With little ones, we stay pretty active," Bizzi said. "We loosen up. We might do something like making the body into a star pose while doing 'Twinkle, Twinkle.' Or we do a tree pose and bird pose and things like that along with the music.

"It's not strictly yoga in the typical sense. I incorporate all sorts of different movement games."


At one point, Bizzi has the children lie down, relax their bodies and focus on their breathing in a technique she calls "floppy yogi."

"I invite them to relax, and each will take a breath," she said. "I'll lift their arm just to get them to relax"

Bizzi said she has taken a few yoga classs herself and has taught a Pilates class for adults that incorporated some yoga moves for the purpose of stretching, but she makes no claim to be a serious yoga teacher herself.

The toddlers at a recent class did not seem to mind. They were having fun forming poses, stretching out and singing along with Pierson's strumming.

"It's remarkable how well young children are able to focus," Bizzi said. "When these little ones take those breaths and breathe, you're able to see it. ... All of us can use that now and then to relax."

And Bizzi said she has seen older children in the classroom fall back on some of those relaxation techniques to cope with stress.

"Kids today have a lot of stress," she said. "[Yoga] gives them coping mechanisms and tools they can use throughout the day. There are so many different aspects and different skills that are being practiced, but all they know is they're having fun."


Tags: children's activities,   Pine Cobble,   preschool,   yoga,   

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Williamstown Select Board Awards ARPA Funds to Remedy Hall

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Select Board on Monday allocated $20,000 in COVID-19-era relief funds to help a non-profit born of the pandemic era that seeks to provide relief to residents in need.
 
On a unanimous vote, the board voted to grant the American Rescue Plan Act money to support Remedy Hall, a resource center that provides "basic life necessities" and emotional support to "individuals and families experiencing great hardship."
 
The board of the non-profit approached the Select Board with a request for $12,000 in ARPA Funds to help cover some of the relief agency's startup costs, including the purchase of a vehicle to pick up donations and deliver items to clients, storage rental space and insurance.
 
The board estimates that the cost of operating Remedy Hall in its second year — including some one-time expenses — at just north of $31,500. But as board members explained on Monday night, some sources of funding are not available to Remedy Hall now but will be in the future.
 
"With the [Williamstown] Community Chest, you have to be in existence four or five years before you can qualify for funding," Carolyn Greene told the Select Board. "The same goes for state agencies that would typically be the ones to fund social service agencies.
 
"ARPA made sense because [Remedy Hall] is very much post-COVID in terms of the needs of the town becoming more evident."
 
In a seven-page letter to the town requesting the funds, the Remedy Hall board wrote that, "need is ubiquitous and we are unveiling that truth daily."
 
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