Move Your Body!

Walk, Wiggle, Dance, or Even Hop!

Break up seated activities with movement. Or make the activity centered around moving.

How long can you sit at a desk before you must get up and go? How long do you think your students can go without movement? Are all movements created equal?

The Science I Explored

…Scientific data overwhelmingly argue that the human body was designed for physical activity that challenges our resting physiologic homeostasis. Throughout life, exercise causes measurable biological consequences that enhance well-being. Recent data show that exercise reduces the risk for many diseases such as breast and colon cancer, obesity, type-II diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, just to mention a few. Exercise was also shown to improve brain functions.

…We now see that after cardiovascular exercise, children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) improve on various measures such as attentional resource allocation, which may be directly related to how they modulate dopamine release.27

Products

A Situation

A school has students all day. Some educators have students for just under an hour. Others have students for four to five straight hours. Each subject taught includes sitting, whether on the floor or in a chair. The

students get the most active movement when leaving their class or in a physical education class.

Incorporating Movement

The idea is that our human body is meant to be active. For educators who only encounter their students for just under an hour, time is critical. When entering the room, have students “swim” to their seat and keep swimming for sixty seconds, as if they are in a swim meet. Use any safe active movement for sixty seconds at any point during your session. It may be a small amount of time, but if every educator that the student encounters participated, the active time would add up. And if the educator participates in the same activity for each of the classes, her/his active minutes add up as well.

For educators who have students for three to four hours straight, use the same “active transition” in between subjects. Do not be limited though. Use activity at any moment you deem necessary. Use dance, clapping, jogging in place, running in place, or a “Simon Says” speed round.

Make a list of movements you can do in class and create a poster of the moves so you will not be at a loss for something to do and allow the students to make movement choices.

Remember that saying “move it or lose it”? Well, there you go—a true statement. Can you hear the sound of your students running in place to get from the literacy hour to the science hour? Say it with me: “I’m a moving machine!”

Lukasz M. Konopka, “How exercise influences the brain: a neuroscience perspective,” NCBI, Updated April 2015, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4410170/.

Quotes

True enjoyment comes from activity of the mind and exercise of the body; the two are ever united.

—Wilhelm Von Humboldt

We do not stop exercising because we grow old—we grow old because we stop exercising.

—Kenneth Cooper