Exercise in the classroom works. Learn how these educators successfully put movement back in their schools and classrooms.
Ready to Move to Learn yet? If so, let’s get started.
SUCCESS: This can be done even without a lot of resources.
“As a district, we’ve had to set some priorities because we don’t receive funding from the state for physical education teachers, so we use local monies for that. And then you have to get a little creative, but we said this is important, this is something we want to do. We’re just going to start from scratch, start with what we have and make it into the best we can. I was always taught that by my parents: you take what you have and make the best of it. And that’s what we’ve done. We’re a good example of how people without money have implemented the programs we have done. We’ve used grants, combined funds. But it has to be a priority.”
SUCCESS: Small breaks can make a big difference.
“A teacher will be teaching and for a ten-minute period, we just stop and they’ll just get up and walk around the room, or jump up and down. Just give them an opportunity to release energy. Like I said, the lower the grade, the more energy they need to release. They’ll go and take walks…nature walks, so you’ll be teaching a lesson and you’ll get to a point and you just stop and take a nature walk. Just walk outside around the campus and come back in and we found our kids are more attentive when they do those kinds of things.”
SUCCESS: You can move and learn at the same time.
“Some of them are just for fun and it’s more like following directions when it comes to the Chicken Dance, the Macarena, and the Cupid Shuffle. All of those – they do help with following directions – and that’s a common core standard – but we also have some that y’all heard today where the students are counting – they’re counting by twos, fives and tens – and so we’re integrating math into that dancing and so it’s not just we’re dancing to dance, but we’re also integrating the common core standards into what we’re doing. The students, once they dance, it just kind of makes them alive. And as one of our students said earlier, it gets his brain going.”
