Encouraging middle school and high school students to move can be a challenge, especially in a classroom setting. Anything high intensity or vigorous may be de-motivating. One suggestion to get them at least moving at a light intensity level is seated yoga. Below are some seated yoga poses that you may lead your students through [...]
As the school year winds down and the weather gets warmer, we tend to give students more opportunities to go out for recess. In case you haven’t noticed, kids don’t know how to play anymore, especially when they have the freedom to choose what they want to do. They hang around the teachers or sit [...]
So you've implemented classroom movement breaks, but are they working? Our study on The Walking Classroom says they are. Learn more about the study and how to know if classroom movement breaks work for your students. In our study on The Walking Classroom, which is a series of audio recordings of academic content students listen [...]
If you’re reading this, you probably value your students’ perspectives and you are interested in offering physical activity opportunities for them. While many studies have been conducted to show support for classroom physical activity, most of them report on the amount of physical activity the breaks provide for students and/or how the physical activity relates [...]
5G is the latest version of cellular technology, designed to increase the speed of wireless networks. Just as phones and cellular service companies need updates and means to improve their value, schools need different techniques to encourage teachers to offer (or offer more) movement breaks. If the motivation to allow students to do activity breaks [...]
What if I told you that naps may actually help students retain information? It may seem counter-intuitive, but taking breaks has been shown to help people remember more. This concept is called the “spacing effect”. Much like how we learn best with sports skills, cognitive performance is improved if we provide multiple learning sessions with [...]
Let’s make your school a more inviting space for active seating! Here are four places where you can implement active seating and different ideas for each: Classroom – This one’s the obvious one. It’s likely your space, so you can arrange things however you want. Try active chairs with backs, wobbly chairs, stability balls, and different [...]
Summer’s here! The new school year will start in August or September for most of us. Ready for a new and fresh space? Start with a mental inventory of your class seating by scanning the room and counting the number of spaces available for students to sit or stand while learning. A 1:1 seat to [...]
While the 10-minute limit on attention span for college students has not been effectively evinced, we do know there is an inverse relationship between the length of lecture and retention of material learned during that time. Additionally, Bradbury suggests that teachers matter more than the teaching format/length of the class. Thus, active learning at all [...]
Teachers often fall along a continuum of integrating movement in their classrooms, ranging from fully comfortable to extremely hesitant, for a variety of reasons. It’s my goal, as a teacher educator, to try to move all pre-service and in-service teachers down the spectrum to the “fully comfortable” side. As part of a university class that [...]
