Fit Lit: How Movement Impacts Learning (Transcript)

Teacher: You guys can do it.

Student: So this is my third one, right?

Teacher: Yeah.

Teacher: Justin!

Alison: Movement is good for everyone. It helps everybody learn. They can learn while they’re moving and they can learn after they’ve just been moving a lot.

Student: You can barely ride the bike.

Val: It’s really this fitness class combined with language arts. For three days of the week, it’s fitness and then language arts, about 45 minutes apiece. And then two days, it’s all fitness in one and then all language arts. Aerobic exercise definitely boosts our capacity to retain information, boost our memory and the speed, we can take in and then rework information. Anaerobic affects more mood and it’s a stress reliever and it kind of calms us down, so it’s more of an emotional benefit.

Sarah: And we go for hikes, we do these 5Ks, we do yoga. We’ve had them get with a partner, talk about your topic while they’re walking around the soccer field or jogging with a partner, talking about things from the book they’re reading.

Alison: It’s teaching them that you don’t have to sit and think to figure something out. You can move and think and figure something out.

Ethan: After this class right now, we’re going to go up into language arts and we do this because there a lot of studies that if you exercise before you work, it really gets your brain going.

Sarah: By far the best days are when we have a really concise, challenging fitness workout and we get them up here and boom, get them into journaling. And you can just sort of tell when we’ve hit the sweet spot.

Val: They’re tired, but not exhausted. There’s just a certain alertness in that class that shows up.

Student: In some cases, like with the workforce–

Val: Something happened that we didn’t predict, and that is that they are really good to each other. They’re just a team and they’ve pushed each other and they’ve encouraged each other in this physical way. And they’ve played games and had to play by rules and had to be inclusive. Then they come into this class and that just continues.

Haley: I can concentrate better after I do a workout, like doing a 5K or running for ten minutes. And it helps me with my next classes in the day.

Technology was a big part in the nineteen fifties. Technology started to change and it was being brought into homes.

Sarah: I think the time will come that it will be a no brainer that every class will get to where we just have more movement in school, that’s where it’s going.

Schools That Work

Casey Middle School