Have you ever noticed how antsy you get on a teacher inservice day? When you sit at a table (or worse, a student desk) and wish the speaker would give lots of breaks? This is how many of our students feel on any given day. The quiet kids try to hide it, the squirmy ones....well, you can tell that they are itching to get to recess. Besides the fact that movement enhances learning at all ages, our students have different learning preferences. And most often, our kinesthetic learners get left out in favor of the auditory or verbal learning activities.
There are a number of ways to get kids up and moving in your math class. How about having the little kids be their own clock hands and move to make 3:00, 6:00, or 9:00? Find a large enough space in your building or outside when the weather is nice to construct a coordinate plane or to make human-sized pie graphs. Younger children could count to ten while doing jumping jacks or jumping rope (thereby integrating PE and math class!) or could make their own human addition and subtraction problems. Moving + math = engaged learners!