Students spend seven or more hours in school a day. It is unreasonable to expect them to sit quietly throughout their lessons and classwork. When you remove the chairs, you instantly provide freedom of movement. You instantly open up whole new opportunities to extend children’s learning as a wider variety of equipment becomes instantly accessible and small bodies are not confined to their corner of the table.

Movement throughout the day helps students to re-energize their bodies and their brains, helping them to focus and concentrate better. Research has shown that movement during the school day benefits academic performance and improves behavior. In the same context, incorporating movement into your lessons keeps the students engaged and excited about learning. Movement in lessons will also help your students to retain the content more.

What is the impact of physical activity on both academic performance and student behaviors?

Physical activity has been found to enhance learning as well as improve student behavior. By learning the rules and guidelines involved in structured physical fitness and having unstructured movement time to engage with peers, physically active students tend to exhibit more responsible personal and social choices.

Students are diverse and do not fit into a cookie-cutter mold. Their needs and the way they learn are also diverse and no one way fits all. Educators need to learn other ways to reach the diverse needs of students. Action-based learning will allow educators to reach the diverse needs of students within their classroom.

So what are some ways you can incorporate movement into your lessons?

The body can be utilized as a powerful vehicle through which educators can reach students and embed content. Accommodating movement in the classroom is a growing trend. Students who are less successful at traditional academic subjects often excel at these dramatic exercises. It is imperative to offer students many opportunities to utilize movement that invites them to create a space that allows room for physical and intellectual movement and support for adventuresome thinking and risk-taking.

Educators can incorporate new strategies for embodied learning in an increasingly digital world, specifically through virtual-world avatars or touchless, interactive technology that allow students to control navigation of movement. Kinems’ activities provide students multiple ways to physically express what they know by giving them options for demonstrating mastery of knowledge.

What Kinems’ games support the action and expression for students?

Manipulate the Hero

The child appears as an avatar and controls its environment through movement and play.

Marvy Learns: perfect active learning game to help your students increase and develop gross motor skills, visual perception and eye-hand coordination

RuniRoon: Using their body, the student controls an avatar character of a raccoon that runs along a path in order to collect the correct appearing objects.

Immersive Games

The child is the actor and becomes totally immersed in the game to reach a goal.

Spot On: strengthens movement skills and spatial awareness strategies to quickly navigate the game board and successfully create words by picking up boxes quickly and placing them on the appropriate spot

Over the Galaxy: Mission is to count objects that various spaceships carry, choose only the ones that match the specified number.

Sea Formuli: Kids appear as an avatar; By making movements of both hands together, the student needs to move the jellyfish with the correct number or operator into the empty basket thus filling-in the equation.

Just as a carpenter has a tool belt with a number of options to choose from, so does technology give educators a wide array of options for engaging learners and helping them access their learning environment. When used in a thoughtful way, technology opens up many possibilities for learners to find and express their own voices, take ownership of their learning and become creators of knowledge instead of just consumers of information.

Kinems offers a wide range of activities that promote children's development of motor skills, enabling them to reach their full potential! When educators utilize our active learning games, they have access to a seamless teaching tool that evaluates and monitors every child’s academic progress in real-time and promotes UDL learning.

 

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