Jan 2015 Cultures for Learning

I read an article to day about how getting children to be more active within classrooms can actually help them to learn. It didn’t seem surprising to me at all, what is surprising is the way we expect even small children to spend large parts of their day actually sitting down.

Small children move constantly, as soon as you go outdoors many children will want to hop skip and run. Now while I can appreciate that sometimes sitting is necessary, after all there are often upwards of 30 in a class so if they are to get any instruction then the class probably needs to be ‘sitting quietly’ – but surely these times should be the exception not the rule. Yet so often in schools it seems children have to sit at desks and ‘work’.

But are they learning?

It’s not just children, many office environments are also based on the premise that most employees will sit fairly still for hours at a time. Yet recent research suggests that both health and productivity can be improved by moving about more.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/03/11/new-study-treadmill-desks-boost-productivity/

Some problems can no doubt can be solved by prolonged mental activity, whilst sat at a desk but it is also useful to talk to others, simply explaining the problem to someone else can make answers more apparent.  If I feel stuck when I am working on something I will often go for a walk, and creative ideas will often happen after a burst of physical activity OR when not thinking about the problem at hand.

So I would encourage everyone to read the article Five Movement Strategies that Get Students thinking  and then start thinking yourself!

Too Much Sitting? Five Movement Strategies That Get Students Thinking

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