Integrating Movement into Learning
When my daughter was little, she was a wiggle bug! I remember trying to get her through her spelling words or math facts and she would be jumping up and down, laying on the floor, standing up or sitting on the floor.
We tried everything from having her sit at the dining room table, sitting in the kitchen right next to me while I cook dinner, to sitting at a desk in her room quietly. All of that worked for small increments of time but nothing would really stick. She could maybe focus and work by herself for about 10 minutes and that was it…back out and looking for movement.
Enter integration of movement into learning.
Learning does not take place in a vacuum. Although traditional school is starting to come around and we are starting to see more therapy balls in the classroom and teachers are trying to integrate more movement time while learning- it is certainly not at a scale to which most children learn at their best. Especially children with learning differences
Here are a few ideas that might help when you are thinking about structuring your child’s school day.
- Vary their position. Remember that not all children need to sit down when they are learning. As a matter fact, children typically do best when they are moving their bodies. So, allowing your child to stand up while writing, or sit on a therapy ball for math, or using a semi inflated beach ball as a move and sit are great ways to provide a little bit of movement while they are working.
- Make the activity fun and interesting to feed their nervous system and keep them alert for learning. What if your child was learning how to spell words and instead of writing them out 10 times each, you laid out pieces of paper with letters of the alphabet on the floor and they jumped to each letter in order to spell out the spelling word?
a. It takes the physical aspect of writing out of learning how to spell the word (which helps kids develop a mental map of the word).
b. The kid is moving their body, which helps them focus and regulate for learning. Who can go wrong with that?
- Invest in some dry erase markers. There’s nothing better than doing any writing on a vertical surface and your sliding glass door or your front window is exactly the place it should be done. (I also use Crayola crayon slicks). These are a wax type crayon that easily come off of glass.
When you allow your child to write on a vertical surface it not only brings the child into a standing position (for good attention), it allows them to strengthen their shoulders- which is super important for having a base for fine motor skills. PLUS it’s way interesting!
Learning is fun and effective with some extra movement!
My kids used the sliding glass door when they were little for everything from writing out spelling words to completing math problems. Sometimes, we would work out the whole math problem and then take a picture of the math problem and send it to the teacher. If you’re homeschooling, you can just take a picture and put it in their portfolio for future reference.
