Do you ever feel like your students have a crazy amount of energy from the time they walk through the door, to the time they leave? This is very normal, and if they don’t then you might have a problem. While observing the students in my current field placement, it seems that the teacher in the classroom is using that extra energy against himself. What if I told you there was a way to use that energy in a positive way to improve instruction. We can do this by incorporating movement into the classroom. The big question that I am going to talk about in this post is, “How does movement in the classroom improve student learning?”
While reading an article that promotes movement in the classroom, it lists a lot of positive ways that movement helps young children. One way that I found is that it increases student engagement with academic content. For example, when learning about the life cycle of an animal you could have the students stand up and do certain movements to go with each event that occurs. This will force the students to pay attention and engage themselves in the material. It will also be another way for the students to remember the information. Another positive thing that movement provides is, it allows children to get out some of their built up energy. Having movement throughout the day will limit the amount of times that students have trouble sitting in their seats. If you have time set aside for this, you will have more control over student distractions during a lesson. I could go on forever about the positive benefits of adding movement into the classroom, because it is so important and a great tool to use.
In conclusion, adding movement in the classroom is a crucial tool to have in the classroom. You don’t even have to really make extra time for it because you can incorporate it into your lessons. Students have an endless amount of energy, so why would we not use that to our advantage? Movement in the classroom will allow kids to get out that extra energy that they are holding in, and to hopefully improve their attention spans and paying attention to the content.