Dive Brief:
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Elementary school students benefit from movement during the school day, and this can be particularly beneficial when tied to elementary literacy curriculum. There are strategies educators can use to embed movement in their lesson plans either on their own or by partnering with others.
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Teachers can bring movement right into the classroom by moving desks and chairs to the edges of the space, said Susan Griss, a learning consultant who taught graduate courses for early education and elementary teachers at the Bank Street College of Education in New York. But, she added, educators should always think about why they’re choosing to have students move — and what they want that activity to bring to lessons.
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“Working with a colleague who is a gym or yoga teacher is a good idea, but there is a difference between doing movement in general, which is always good and stimulates the brain, and movement whose content reflects the actual content of the curriculum,” Griss said.
Dive Insight:
Griss, the author of “Minds in Motion: A Kinesthetic Approach to Teaching Elementary Curriculum,” said there are many benefits to linking movement to curriculum.
To start, when movement is woven into learning — especially around literacy — the lesson becomes more “memorable,” Griss said. Adding interpretive movement to a story, for example, helps students feel more engaged, partly because they are inserting themselves into the narrative.
“When students interpret a story through movement, they can become all the parts of the story — the characters, actions, emotions, setting and weather,” Griss said. “This helps them more fully comprehend the sequence, theme and meaning of a story. And when students climb into the skin of a character in a book, they can more intimately feel their grief, fear, sadness, confusion, their anger, their courage, their pride — which inherently deepens the text-to-self relationship.”
Griss said educators can even draft lessons that include movement with lessons on the structure of literacy, including vocabulary, grammar and creative writing. For example, she said, students can turn punctuation marks into movements that mirror the dots and shapes of a period or comma, such as throwing their hands over their head while speaking to demonstrate quotation marks.
Even transforming vocabulary words into movement adds another sensory interaction to the learning, and likely embeds the meaning further, Griss said.
“Besides increasing the engagement of students and deepening their comprehension of a story, the movement stimulates visualization of the text,” Griss said. “As the children become the story, they have the experience of a movie playing in their heads, which heightens their immediate connection to the words as well as recall afterwards.”
Correction: In a previous version of this article, Susan Griss’ current role was misidentified. We have updated our story to reflect this.
