Finding ways to get students active can be particularly helpful in making elementary literacy content more memorable, says Susan Griss, who teaches graduate courses for early education and elementary teachers at the Bank Street College of Education in New York, according to K-12 Dive.
Griss, the author of “Minds in Motion: A Kinesthetic Approach to Teaching Elementary Curriculum,” says there are many benefits to linking movement to curriculum.
When movement is woven into learning — especially around literacy — the lesson becomes more “memorable,” she says. Adding interpretive movement to a story, for example, helps students feel more engaged, partly because they insert themselves into the narrative.
“Movement helps students become all the parts of the story — the characters, actions, emotions, setting and weather,” Griss says. “This helps them more fully comprehend the sequence, theme and meaning of a story. They can more intimately feel characters’ grief, fear, sadness, confusion, their anger, their courage, their pride. This deepens the text-to-self relationship.”
Educators can draft lessons that include movement with lessons on the structure of literacy, including vocabulary, grammar and creative writing. For example, 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.
Transforming vocabulary words into movement adds another sensory interaction to the learning, and likely embeds the meaning further.
“Movement stimulates visualization of the text,” Griss says. “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.”
K-!2 Dive
