Get Up and Move! into Literacy

When my son was in second grade he had a hard time sitting still long enough to memorize spelling words, so we invented a game called 'Spin and Spell'. I recited the words, and he spelled them out loud while spinning in a circle. According to the game rules, he couldn’t stop spinning until he had spelled all the words correctly. The game turned a dreaded task into a fun one, and it worked: my son’s ability to spell a word correctly improved after a few rounds of the game.

It turns out that Spin and Spell is a form of kinesthetic learning, and there’s evidence to suggest that kinesthetic learning improves student success by:

• increasing blood flow, which stimulates learning.

• stimulating the release of dopamine and noradrenalin in the brain, which also enhances learning. Dopamine is released when we are happy, so children who exercise while learning may associate that learning with happy feelings.

• combining cross-body movements with learning. Evidence suggests that cross body movements integrate the right and left hemispheres of the brain and facilitate new learning.

I’ve known for some time that a company local to my area, Math Made Fun, produces kinesthetic math products, but didn’t know that they had branched into kinesthetic reading material until I ran into company president Suzy Koontz at a book festival. For the October I can Read! Blog carnival I’d like to share some information about the innovative products this company sells.

a little girl using a Math Made Fun Alphabet Hop Mat 

Math Made Fun makes several types of literacy and math exercise mats as well as workbooks and a curriculum for teaching children to skip count through dance exercises. Skip counting, in which a child counts 2,4,6,8…,  3,6,9,12… and so on, facilitates the learning of multiplication facts. To see the Math Made Fun kinesthetic learning program in action, watch this video. For research on the success of this type of kinesthetic learning, visit the company's Math and Movement page.

The durable mats that the company now sells are meant for long-term classroom use and are rather expensive, but Koontz says that the company is developing a line of more inexpensive mats for home use that should be available before Christmas.