It's Thursday morning in an upstairs room in Balham Nursery in south London. Seventeen children, aged three and four, have come clomping up the stairs and are taking off their shoes with varying degrees of success.
Getting this lot to do yoga seems a bit ambitious. A circle(ish) is formed. The children are asked to keep their listening ears out and to imagine a long piece of string is attached to the back of their heads with a balloon on top.
"My balloon is purple," says Maisy, sitting up straight as an arrow.
"Mine is blue," says one of the boys.
Now they are pretending their legs are slices of bread, rolling their bodies back and forth as they spread the butter.
"What are we going to put in our sandwiches?" asks the instructor, Bonny Messenger. "Nutella. Lots and lots." says Lettie.
Later they come across a baby mouse and a lion cub and a vicious bull called Barney, and pretty soon they are travelling over fences and through woods full of dark trees and across yoga streams. Something has happened almost without anyone noticing - most of the children are concentrating on the story. They are stretching their bodies into the shapes of the animals, crouching to form bridges, bringing their feet to their ears to answer the telephone, linking together in a line to create a snake. At one point they even conform to the grown-up yoga stereotype and "greet the sun". When the story has reached a satisfyingly happy conclusion, they lie down and close their eyes to think about it.
"Let's do lovely yoga breathing to come down," says Messenger. "Lovely, calming breathing. Let's do a little smile without moving our lips. Keep very still. Look up at the ceiling and the lovely big fluffy clouds. What can you see up there?" "A princess," says Misha.
Some of them are given lavender bean bags to place over their eyes. One boy puts out his hand as if to catch something.
After, as they file out, I ask Maisy what she had liked best. "Lying down and closing my eyes. It makes me feel happy."
YogaBugs is a simple format with a big idea behind it. It is an exercise class for two-and-a-half to seven-year-olds that uses story-telling to do all the things yoga does for adults - improve posture, coordination and balance, strengthen muscles, release anxiety and teach relaxation. But because they are children, they are getting other benefits to do with concentration and self-esteem, all of which help with learning.
May Stirling, who is deputy head of the nursery, says she notices a huge difference in all the children after they have done a class. "It's good for their balance, it gives them spatial awareness and puts them in touch with their own bodies. What's that word? It makes them proprioceptive."
YogaBugs, the brainchild of Nell Lindsell - who used to co-own a yoga centre in south London called Higgledy Piggledy - was launched in 2003. Its initial aim, tapping into the government initiative to get children more active, was to train people to teach children yoga. In August last year, YogaBugs appeared on BBC2's business programme Dragon's Den which, in Lindsell's words, took "a small company to nationwide status" and since then it has mushroomed to the point where 1,200 teachers have now been trained in Britain and Ireland (between 30-40% of them funded by local authorities). Each week, through YogaBugs franchises, in nursery schools and primary schools, health clubs and community centres, 40,000 children are having yoga adventures - taking rockets to the moon, flying on magic carpets, dancing in underwater palaces - and greeting the sun. Lindsell's book, which shows parents how to practise yoga with their children at home, will be published by Virgin early next year.
"You are helping kids to lay healthy foundations for life, not just through the strength and flexibility of their bodies, but also to express themselves through animal sounds and imagery," says Lindsell. "Some of these kids . . . who knows what emotional issues they have. Yoga can help them to let what's inside out, to process things better. They sleep better. It's non judgmental, non-competitive - you can be terrible at football, but brilliant at yoga. Kids are so flexible, they are often much better at yoga than we are."
She emphasises how helpful yoga can be for children with additional needs. "Dyspraxic children have often missed out on the crawling stage, but yoga can help remedy any resulting lack of strength and coordination. You're working with different hemispheres of the brain. It's like brain gym."
Lindsell doesn't teach much any more - she's too busy expanding the business - but she used to run a class at Holy Ghost primary school nearby. "There was one boy who was on the autistic spectrum. He was very quiet. He wanted the same mat, in the same spot. He didn't like the 'om'. But children on the autistic spectrum are often hypermobile and he became a great yogi. He knew every move. He would draw them at home. By the end he was almost leading the class. The other children were like, 'Gosh, wow, look what William can do.' And outside the class, his occupational therapist saw enormous improvements in his coordination and motor skills."
My three-year-old joined in the YogaBugs class at Balham Nursery. Afterwards, a friend asked her to demonstrate what she'd learned. She began to tell the whole story of the lost cat and the scary bull and then broke off. "For the rest," she said, "I'll need my lavender bean bag."
