Pre-kindergarten students at Nansemond-Suffolk Academy start the day with salutes to the sun, downward dogs, and elephant and earth poses, to name just a few.

After educators Linda Nash and Virginia Elliott attended a kids’ yoga conference in September, the popular physical, mental and spiritual discipline has exploded — for want of a more Zen-like word — in NSA’s three pre-K classes.

Elliott, an assistant teacher who leads sessions in Mindy Webb’s classroom, believes that as a result of yoga, the 3- and 4-year-olds are more focused and in control of their behavior, increasingly self-aware and less prone to obesity.

“You are thinking about where all the parts of your body are,” Elliott said. “As a whole, they are so much more aware and have better control of themselves.”

On Tuesday, Nash’s first maneuver for her 4-year-olds was the elephant. They swung their arms from left to right, mimicking an elephant’s trunk, a set number of times.

As well as releasing tension and loosening up the shoulders, the elephant defines “left” and “right” for the children and teaches them how to count, Nash said.

Next, the children rotated their shoulders, pivoted from the hips, put their hands on their bellies and breathed deeply, stretched straight up for the pencil pose and then assumed the warrior.

“Yay,” they cried when Nash ushered in the apparently popular land bridge, which was called the dragon in Elliott and Webb’s room, where kids scramble beneath one another while doing the downward dog, each adding a new section to the tunnel after reaching the end so that they all are doing downward dogs by the end.

“When you are in that tight space, it really does make you aware,” Nash said. “It helps the dopamine in the brain and it helps self-regulation and it’s calming.”

According to Elliott, who says she does a lot of independent research on new poses and yoga’s lifelong benefits, the program sprang from a discussion at the beginning of the instructional year about ways to introduce more physical education into pre-K classes.

The objective was to introduce focus, coordination, concentration and body awareness, she said, adding, “What better way than yoga?”

When children began asking if they could instruct sessions, to help guide them, posters were created with labeled photos of children demonstrating poses, Elliott said.

Some exercises are less physical and more psychological. In one, a Hershey’s Kiss is placed before each child, who spends two minutes carefully unwrapping the chocolate, and smoothing out the wrapper, before eating it.

“When you read the research on willpower and self-control in children,” yoga improves both dramatically, Elliott said. “It’s the difference between becoming parents who are high school dropouts and parents who have college degrees.”

Jean Mauck, its pre-kindergarten director, called yoga “a game-changer” at NSA. “It teaches these kids how the self-regulate at 3 or 4 — that’s pretty incredible,” she said.