- Four Corners
Five More Strategies to Get Students Moving
A year ago, I wrote I my most popular post yet “Five Movement Strategies in the High School Classroom.” Since that time, an adapted version of the post has been featured on TeachThought, and some teachers in my district and I were interviewed for an Education Update piece. It seems that many educators are dedicating themselves to meet the need for movement to enhance learning.
In the last year, the connection between movement and learning has become even clearer. There was the amazing Alexis Wiggins post that showed that students sat for nearly 90% of their class time and that all that sitting was actually exhausting. Donna Wilson’s Edutopia post described how movement increases oxygen flow to the brain (which enhances learning), as well as altering neurotransmitters and the structure of the brain. The idea of brain breaks has increased, especially with the rise of GoNoodle in elementary grades (for some ideas for brain breaks with high school students, check out my colleague, Kathy Bonyun’s page).
Recently, I was listening to Dr Michael Trayford’s Train your Brain podcast, when I learned about an organism called the sea squirt. The sea squirt is a creature that moves through the ocean until it attaches itself to a rock. At that point, it never moves again, and, literally digests its own brain and spinal cord. Just think about how this relates to learning in humans. Although our physiology would not allow digestion of the brain from lack of movement, we certainly lose neural connections from lack of movement. Our brains have evolved to relate movement and learning.
With all that said, people have been asking me for more movement ideas, so without further ado, here are five more strategies to get students moving.
[…] Clamoring for more movement strategies? Check out my sequel to this post with five more ways to get students moving. […]