Creative RelaxationSM : A Yoga-Based Program for Regular and Exceptional Student Education

School is a stressful place, especially for those with special needs. Sitting still, paying attention, staying on task are not skills that come easily to anxious learners,yet classroom learning is very difficult without these constraints. There are few opportunities in most educational curricula to train students in the skills required for self-control and focusing the mind. Any Yoga teacher knows, however, that control of the body and mind are skills that one can learn with instruction and practice. Creative RelaxationSM is a Yoga-based program designed to teach students to strengthen, stretch, and calm the body, quiet the mind, and control the breathing. The teaching principles of Creative Relaxation are as follows: make a sacred space, engage the student, provide tools for success, and create opportunities for independence. This article will demonstrate ways to apply these principles in an educational setting for regular and exceptional student education, based on the experience of the author as a consultant in the public school system since 1981. Anecdotal data and examples will be given from the author's work with children in regular education,as well as with those with autism and related disabilities,emotional handicaps, ADHD, and learning disabilities, and with anxious learners. In addition, the author collaborated with school professionals in a study to evaluate the effectiveness of a Yoga-based relaxation program for six children with autism over an eight-week period. A summary of the group's findings is presented.

Scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition and Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement-Revised for a Sample of Children with Emotional Handicaps

Because there is little available research, this study examined the associations between scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition and the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement-Revised for 85 children with diagnosed emotional handicaps. Analysis indicated associations were significant.

Time Estimation and Planning Abilities: Students with and without Mild Disabilities

In this study we sought to examine differences among groups of elementary students with and without disabilities on a measure of time estimation. We assessed the time estimation recall of 51 students with and without emotional handicaps, learning disabilities, and attentional disorders and examined the relationship between time estimation and the self-regulatory skills of planning and organization. Group differences in time estimation recall were documented, but these differences were no longer significant after controlling for IQ. In planning and organization, students who scored higher on time estimation were less likely to use notes and lists for organization. Our findings call into question prior research that has not controlled for group differences in IQ and support the need for a curriculum in which time-estimation skills are taught directly and in a functional manner.

Pediatrics and the Unwanted Child in History: Foundling Homes, Disease, and the Origins of Foster Care in New York City, 1860 to 1920

In recent years, America's present means of providing for unwanted children, the foster care system, has come under severe criticism from many child-serving professional groups. The Committee on Adoption and Dependent Children of the American Academy of Pediatrics notes that children in foster care are not likely to receive routine health care, such as immunizations and screening for hypertension, dental caries, or vision or hearing problems.1 Yet these vulnerable children frequently have significant health problems, and they may require more medical attention than the average child. In Massachusetts, 33% of the children in foster care have emotional handicaps, 13% suffer from serious physical illnesses, 19% are mentally retarded, and 15% have multiple handicaps.2 Children in foster care often lack a single health provider and they have few health advocates. Despite criticism from pediatricians about the sorry state of health care provided to these children, pediatricians frequently find themselves in the uneasy position of recommending foster care placement to social service workers in intransigent cases of child abuse and neglect. Child psychiatrists, such as Anna Freud and Albert Solnit, have joined pediatricians in criticizing foster care. They point out that a child cannot develop emotionally in a rotating system of foster homes. With each move, the foster child becomes less open, attachments less intense. As a result, children emerge from foster care with significant emotional handicaps.3 Social workers, those professionals who work most closely with unwanted children, have added to the chorus of concern over foster care. They point to the difficulty of early identification of the family in trouble and then successful intervention.