More than ever, students need to MOVE. With decreasing attention spans and an increasing need for stimulation, students need movement in order to stay engaged in the academic content in the classroom.
How can we include movement in the classroom?
As an entry point, any worksheet can be made into a kinesthetic activity. If you have twenty problems on a worksheet, split the questions up and put them on different sheets of paper then display them around the room. This can be easy, quick, and doesn’t need a ton of prep but the pay off can be great!
A little more intense of an activity would be to do stations around the room. The stations could each have a set of questions about a certain topic or the stations could each have a different sub-activity to complete. One of my favorite things to do at a station is to have some questions posted on the wall, typically five or six. Then, students answer the questions and complete a color-by-number activity to reveal either a code or an image. This also helps keep students engaged in the activity since it may be different from what they are doing in other classes.
Lastly, and one of my favorites to do, is a scavenger hunt.
How to incorporate scavenger hunts
Scavenger hunts can be some of the most engaging activities you can do in your classroom. They help students foster curiosity, interdependence, collaboration, and of course, they are moving around the room. Scavenger hunts also make the learner more fun for the students. These activities could include riddles to where the questions or objects are hidden or it could be more of a hide-and-seek activity where the students just need to find the questions or objects on their own!
My most recent, and most successful, example of a scavenger hunt that I did was my Kauai Field Cricket scavenger hunt. For this activity, I hid over a hundred paper crickets around my room. Some of the crickets were on the ceiling, some were behind sinks, some were under tables, and some were even under tissue boxes! Students were tasked with finding and identifying if the crickets had a parasite or if they were parasite free. They were given ten minutes to do so and holy cow, did they hunt for those crickets!
After the time was up, we had a discussion as a class to see what our tallies were for each type of cricket. A lot of students did not find all of the crickets (which is definitely ok!) but a lot of them were in the right ballpark. After we collected and corrected the data, we constructed some data tables to display the collected data then we graphed our results.
Students were more engaged with the harder tasks of constructing data tables and graphs because they collected the data themselves. This created more ownership over their education and learner which fosters better understanding of the content and more appreciation for the learning.
If you would like to check out the resource that I used, it will be linked here.
I hope your school year is going well! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out on TPT.
Thank you,
-Mr. Tim
Teaching with Mr. Tim 