When principal Michael Kowalski walks down the hallway and his students shout “Look, I’m a tree!” he doesn’t tell them to get back in their seats. He likes what he sees.

He likes the way his students are using language to describe their actions, that their physical exertion is voluntary and self-regulated, and that they’re interacting with one another in the process.

This seemingly typical classroom conduct isn’t characteristic of children with autism. Then again, Crossroads School in Westfield, NJ, isn’t exactly a by-the-book kind of school. Classes are divided by age (3-12) and abilities, with no more than six students in each. The more behavioral-based, what-color-is-this approach to teaching kids with autism is left by the wayside as students instead move throughout the building to learn their colors (when they’re not taking karate, cooking, or getting an interactive lesson from puppets, that is).

Fact is, you can’t teach body and space awareness with a paper and pencil. But for kids who don’t quite understand their bodily capabilities, a yoga mat provides the sense of boundary they need, says speech language specialist Ronnie Kaufman. (Kaufman headed up the school’s donation drive that brought in long-awaited yoga DVDs and a new player—waiting for a videotape to rewind loses precious focus time.)

When Kaufman, who uses yoga to calm overactive minds before starting a language lesson, says, “Give me Down Dog,” students can strike the challenging pose from memory. Something as seemingly trivial as stopping the DVD and asking “What are we doing now?” is actually a lesson in disguise. Sequence, the very essence of motor movement and language, also happens to be very yoga.

Now that her students have mats (so long, slippery carpet squares), Kaufman hopes to see an improvement in muscle tone and flexibility, mind-body coordination, and how breath can help phonation (the formation of sounds), to name a few. These improvements will of course take time—it can be a stretch to get students to pick their heads up off their desks—but the core stability that’s innate to yoga can help strengthen posture.

But there’s one road the kids have already begun to cross—an increased interest in each other. Though it seems to go against the more isolated grain of autism, they just can’t get enough belly breathing. Laying with their heads on each other’s bellies, “they giggle as they feel each rise and fall,” Kaufman says. 


Find out more about Crossroads School here.