“Sometimes you feel half of the kids are with you and half are zoned out,” said Rachel Parris, a third-year teacher in Greenville South Carolina. Adding movement into her lessons, she observed that “my lower-achieving kids, their reading has gone up.” Julian Reed, Ph.D. Assistant Professor in Health and Exercise Science at Furman University in Greenville SC has given us permission to share some of movement suggestions offered on his website. http://www.moveintheclassroom.com/ “In a typical school day Parris incorporates a movement game into her lessons at least once. ‘They’re cross-hemisphere, so that they’re working both the right-side and the left side of the brain,’ she said about Brain Gym. ‘The kids love them and they can do more afterward’” NWEA is coming up next week, and we’d love to have you join us for “Brain Coaching: Movement” T2-05 in room 1866 Thursday, 12:25-1:35. Please be ready to share your own strategies for adding movement to your classroom to get a special surprise. Adding movement to your classroom pays off. The ways to do it are unlimited. Try some of these in your classroom…
- Plan movement breaks, outdoors if possible, to break up seated lessons.
- Replace classroom chairs with Stability Balls
- Specially designed exercise balls have little feet on the bottom so they stay put.
- Sitting on the balls allows children to move without distracting others.
- Posture improves compared with sitting in chairs.
- Available from Lisa Witt http://www.wittfitt.com/
- Encourage students to have “fidget objects” to keep muscles active during listening or discussion activities.
Reed notes, “With childhood obesity on the rise, educators are finding ways to get kids moving to burn calories, to stay in shape, and to enhance their learning. Here is a brief sample of ways to make movement a part of the regular curriculum, not an “add-on”. Some of the following come from Julian Reed, Ph.D. Assistant Professor (upcoming book Active Education: Lessons for Integrating Physical Activity with Language Arts, Math, Science and Social Studies (Novascience 2009) Curriculum Areas: Math
- Balance while counting to an assigned number by 2’s, 3’s, 5’s, 10’s etc.
- Act out math problems: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, equations
- Clapping rhythm for patterns
- Count movements (hop, skip, leap, jump) into or out of a hoop in a minute
- Measure perimeter in heel-toe steps around a marked circle or large area.
- Experience Time: walk, balance, jump or jog for 1 minute, 3 minutes, 5 minutes.
- Play hop scotch, then add or multiply the numbers
Science
- Five Senses Stations: Partners take a card with a sensory picture or message and deliver it to the appropriate station identifying the sense involved.
- Run in place, then check heart beat under the chin.
- Solar System: Assign a sun and planet names to students, position them in order and have them walk through their orbits, staying in position order around the person named as the sun.
- Make up rhyming songs and motions to recall bones in the skeleton, chemical names, action within an atom.
Language Arts
- Form the body into letter shapes
- Do an alphabet dance
- Class walk around letter signs, stop, everyone picks one up and identifies something that begins with that letter or sound.
- Create a pattern and a rhyme, matching it to a repeated movement
- Act out prepositions
- Vocabulary: one person acts out one of the assigned words while the partner names it.
Art
- Walk or run a pattern to express a line
- Draw a motion after demonstrating it
- Make shapes with the body
- Act out a feeling, then draw it, choosing colors to match feeling
Social Studies
- Assign events to individual students, then have them line up as a timeline.
- Act out a story or historical event
Reed says, “Teachers have concrete evidence — improved grades and fewer discipline problems — after implementing specific movement skills in their classes.” Catherine Dillon, Greenville South Carolina ESOL program lead teacher said, “It never occurred to me… that you can get a person to learn much more easily doing a relay race than in a lecture.” See you at NWEA--or check my schedule for upcoming seminars at About Us. Thanks for taking the time to check this out...I know how precious every second is.
You're Awesome!
Sandi
© Sandra Sunquist Stanton MS, NCC, LPC, Connections of the Heart LLC
For additional articles and information, visit www.ourbrainbuddies.com or send an email sandi@ourbrainbuddies.com
|