Ep 54. Adding Movement to Increase Math Engagement

Johanna Kuiper 0:00
It is time to take a stand. Quite literally actually, in today’s episode, I’m going to be sharing what I believe to be the most overlooked way to get students brains thinking and engaged with math. And that is getting them up and moving. Let’s get started. Welcome to solving for the undefined podcast. I’m your host, Johanna, founder of Miss Kuiper’s Classroom, the place that equips teachers and creating a healthy math classroom where students can thrive, no matter their academic abilities. But it’s not always about the numbers. And that’s why I’m here, bringing you the formulas to solve your problems, math and otherwise, plus strategies on cultivating that necessary math mindset. And that’s what you can count on. Hello, hello. Welcome to a brand new episode. Now, as I said in the intro, this episode is going to be about engaging students through the idea of movement. And how many of you have a smartwatch that gives you hourly stand reminders or reminders to stand. And here’s why they do it. It’s not that standing is good. It’s that sitting is so bad. And students, they do that six, seven hours a day. And like my student teacher says, students brains are in their butts, if they’re sitting, their brain is not going to be working. And that’s what today’s episode is going to be all about agony sharing what movement is in the classroom, why it’s beneficial. And then some ways that you can easily implement this in your classroom to engage your students. So what does movement look like in the classroom? What is it, I like to think of movement in the classroom is getting students up and out of their seats and doing some sort of activity, it could be something where they’re just standing in place, or they’re actually moving around the room doing something. And kind of moving into why it’s important movement is going to increase brain activity. When you’re up and moving, your heart rate increases, which means you’re getting better blood flow and better Oxygen. Oxygen is needed in all parts of your body. And that’s going to help increase the way your brain is thinking and working. And it’s going to do that better. So when kids are up and moving, that’s when thinking is actually going to happen. There was a study done in 2005 by Grissom, that showed that movement and exercise are associated with enhancing math scores. And when they did their testing, they found that it increased student math scores by 16%. That is huge. And additionally, according to another study done by rady I was thinking of reading the math cat, the cat that’s great with rates meow. Additionally, anyway, having physical movement and exercise, and all of that is going to lead to lower disciplinary problems in the long run. And that was a study done by rady in 2008. So there’s huge benefits to introducing movement to the classroom. So now I’m going to share some easy ways to introduce movement, like things that are you can add to what you’re already doing within the classroom. And then some activities that you can do that include movement in them. So thinking about the things that you can add into what you’re already doing. One of my favorites is called the supply Roundup. So the way this works is the bells rung every kid is in their seat, I introduce Hello, welcome. So nice to see you. Here’s the agenda for today. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right, here are the supplies you need. You need a whiteboard, a whiteboard marker and a whiteboard eraser, you have one minute to get your supplies and be back in your seat, go that piece right there of these are the items you need. Go get them You have one minute be back in your seats is called the supply Roundup. And in the shownotes. I’ll post a link so you can see a picture of it or the link to the slides. So you can see what it actually looks like. And I have a one minute timer on there. And it’s the same one minute timer every single time so it has like the same music and background. So students are starting to get the idea that they have one minute to get their stuff and be back in their seat. This has saved so much time, but it also allows students to get up, get something and get back to their seat. It adds just that little piece of movement into your lesson. Another simple thing to add into your lesson is the stand and share. So a lot of times whenever we do something as like a full class, I have students turn and talk. Another way to elevate that quite literally is have them stand up and share and once they’ve come to an answer or everyone in the group has shared then they will sit down. This also gives you a great view rule of which teams are getting done first, and which teams are having to take more time to discuss something. To give you an example, on Friday, what I did with my students is, we’re working on two step equations right now, I had them stand, and they were discussing how they would solve 2x plus three equals nine, or whatever the equation was. And I wanted them to walk each other through the process. And then once they were done, they would all sit down. So they stood, they discussed, and then they sat down. And it was great. It gave me a visual of which teams were done, when it also allowed them that movement of standing, and then sitting back down. Another simple one that you can add in is what I call musical partners. And it’s very similar to musical chairs. But students are they have a prompt, and they are going to stand and they’re going to walk around the room while the music is going. When the music stops. They’re going to partner up with the person closest to them, and answer whatever question is on the screen. And when you implement any of these, sometimes it’s easy to do like a fun question first, rather than a math question, because it eliminates the stress of doing something new, and also having to do math with it. So I always like to start off with like a fun question that first time I introduced this to a new group of students, maybe like, what did you do over the weekend? Or what is your favorite flavor of color, something silly and fun like that. What’s great about the musical partners, too, is it’s going to allow students to talk to more than one person, just like in musical chairs, they’ll walk around, find a partner share. They’ll walk around, find a new partner and share again. And when they have that share again moment, you can either keep the same question. And when you do, it allows students to build on their previous thinking. By taking what their partner also said, you can also do a new question and have like a series of four different questions throughout the time. If you want to get fancy with the tech side, I use Google Slides for all of my slides in my classroom. And whenever you add a video, a YouTube video to your Google Slides, you can set the start time and end time in the format options. And so I will preset when the music is going to start and when it’s going to end so I’m not in charge of it. And it’s really nice way to smoothly do that in the classroom. An alternative to musical partners is find a partner who has the same shoe color, or who has similar length of sleeves, or has the same color hair, you can do those types of matching instead of a random one with musical partners. It’s another way to get students up and moving, and then also engaging with math. I want you to tell me if this sounds like you, you want your students to feel successful in the math classroom, you’re tired by the lack of effort some students give, and you have no idea how to fix it and help students be better successful in math. If any of those sounded like you, I want you to imagine how it would feel to see your students working together on challenging math problems without giving up or hearing mathematical discussions as your students collaborate. That would be the dream, right? Well, I’m here to tell you that it is possible. How do I know because I’ve done it. And now I want to teach you to do the exact same thing in your classroom. So I proudly introduce you to chaos to community. In this course, I’ll teach you three main things, one, how to build community in as little as two weeks to utilize groups to further student success. And three, how community can foster better math understanding? Sounds good, right? So head on over to the show notes, click on chaos to community and sign up today. Hope to see you in there.

Johanna Kuiper 9:13
So those are the pieces that you can integrate into the lessons that you’re already doing. The next four that I’m going to share are kind of their own pieces that you’d have to plan for. And the first one is scavenger hunts. I love scavenger hunts all the way back in episode 24 of the podcast we had Kelly Hogan on and she shared about a couple of things, but one of them was scavenger hunts. So if you want a more in depth thing about scavenger hunts, make sure you go back and listen to episode 24. To give you the synopsis of what a scavenger hunt is, is for a scavenger hunt, there are about 1215 questions and you’re going to print them and post them around the classroom. And each poster that has a question has an answer on top of it. So when students start with a question, the answer they get to that is going to lead them to another poster around the room. And the goal is, by the time they’ve answered all of them, they’re back to the very first question they started with. And this is an activity that truly embodies the idea of movement. Because students are actively standing and walking around the classroom, answering your question, and finding the next poster, they’re going to be getting those steps in whenever you do this style of activity. I like to do scavenger hunts at least once a unit if not more, and they’re a great way to get students to think critically about a problem. And also self check. Because if the answer is not around the room, then they know that they have to rethink the problem that they were doing. Another really great activity that requires movement is clock partners. Now the way I do clock partners might be different than some people, the way I do clock partners is students get a clock, one through 12. And they find people to fill in their clock just for that day. I know some people will make clocks, and it’s for like the whole semester or for the quarter. I just do it for that day. And this in and of itself, finding partners is going to be movement, because they’re standing in finding people to fill in spaces on their clock. And you if I fill in three o’clock, for some one, they’re going to fill three o’clock on mine. That way, we are three o’clock partners. And what I do with these clock partners is I give students a problem. And each kid gets a different problem, maybe like task card or something and they complete that problem, then I tell them to find their three o’clock partner, I’m going to meet up with that person, we’re going to discuss or trade problems, and then do that one. And we can kind of check each other’s work because I just did that problem. And then I go find my two o’clock partner, or the four o’clock whatever number is called. Or another way you could do it is every kid works on the same problem. And when they find a new partner, they’re working on the second problem. That way, there’s still that collaboration and movement piece, but it’s a little bit easier to manage. And usually for clock partners, I have made one, it’s a free download, which I will link in the show notes slash description. And I like to laminate them or put them in dry erase leaves or sheet protectors. That way we can use them again for the next day makes it easy. Another way to introduce movement into the classroom is using it clue driven problems or lessons. So for example, I did a introductory unit on y equals mx plus b, we had previously done y equals mx, but now we’re adding that Y intercept to it. And so I took this problem, and I dissected it into pieces, and had clues around the room that would lead students to learning about Y intercept in a linear equation. And having clues around the room got students up moving, looking at the different clues, figuring out how it related to the things. That is another way a simple way that you can have some more discovery based stuff, as well as movement. Now the last way that I like to introduce movement is one of the things that I’m most passionate about right now and have been for quite a long time. And that is using vertical whiteboards or vertical non permanent surfaces. If you’ve read Peter Liljedahl, his book, building thinking classrooms. Now, he even said in his most recent summit talk, that it’s not that standing is so good. It’s that sitting is so bad. And when kids are at whiteboards, and they’re doing thinking in that standing position, their brains are going to be thinking better and thinking deeper than if they were sitting. I talked more about whiteboards, specifically vertical whiteboards back in episode 31. So just like for scavenger hunts, if you want a deeper dive into vertical, non permanent surfaces, Episode 31 is going to be the place for you to learn that. Here is the rundown, though of vertical whiteboards in the classroom. The reason I love it is not only because students are standing in there getting that movement piece in. But I have found as a result of that students are having better academic discussions with each other about the things that they are learning or questions that they might have and they’re talking to each other about It, like, we just did one on solving equations. And some students had different ideas of how to solve the problem. And both students were correct in their way to approach it. But they were able to discuss what they were doing that led to that answer. And it was so cool to see students having those conversations, because the people who are doing the talking are doing the learning. And if they’re having these academic discussions, it’s showcasing that piece entirely. And if you want to increase movement even more with vertical whiteboards, I like to use thin slice problems, meaning that each piece of paper has its own problem. And they all build on each other, whether it’s in challenge, or it’s like a three act task, where the first one is one piece of it, the second builds on it, and the third builds on it even more. I think Peter Liljedahl says like the first one’s N, and the next one’s n plus one. And the way that it increases movement is once students finished the first one, they have to go to the bucket to grab the second one, walk back to their group, go off back to get the third one, etc. So even though it’s a small piece of added movement, any movement you can do is going to be better than none. So in summary, this episode, we talked about movement being super beneficial for students because it’s increasing heart rate, which increases blood flow and oxygen to the brain, which is going to help thinking happen better. And some ways that we discussed to include movement are the supply roundups, stand and share musical partners. Find a partner who dot dot dot fill in the blank, scavenger hunt clock partners, clue driven problems or lessons and vertical nonpermanent surfaces. So your action step this week is to choose one of those, whether it’s something that you can integrate into the lesson you already have, or an activity that you can add on. Choose one of those and do it, see how it goes. And then ask students how they felt about it. Did you like it? Was there something you think you could change to make it even better involve students in that thinking, and I know when you increase the movement in your classroom, it’s really going to help engage students academically, so that way they can deeply understand and love math. If you enjoyed today’s episode, I want you to check out my Instagram because in the coming weeks, I have something super special that is going to tie in creativity in the math classroom, open problems, movement, a traceability and teamwork all into one tidy little package. So this is your little sneak peek. If you’re interested, check out my Instagram in the coming weeks because I have something in store for you. And with that old calculator. Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode. To find all the links and resources to things talked about in this episode, head on over to Miss Kuiper’s classroom.com and click on podcast

Transcribed by https://otter.ai