Acting Out!

Avoid Behavior Challenges with Active Learning Games and Activities

Rae Pica

• Publisher: Redleaf Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781605546971
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Metodi di insegnamento

Movement is not misbehavior! Current policies in the early childhood field ask teachers to treat children as though they exist from the neck up—even though research clearly demonstrates that the mind-body connection is vital to development. Rae Pica, founder and director of Rae Pica Keynotes & Consulting and author of the Moving and Learning series, advocates for active learning, not only because it's developmentally appropriate but because doing so promotes a calmer, friendlier, and less challenging learning environment.Section I provides theory, research, and language to advocate for active learning. Section II offers suggestions on how to update learning environments, and Rae offers some of her own past missteps in hopes that readers will be able to learn from her mistakes. Section III contains 200 ready-to-use movement activities that can be easily implemented into the day. Most require no materials, and every activity includes a "Curriculum Connection," so readers can understand and clearly explain why the children aren't "just playing."

CHAPTER

1

Rationale

What We Know about Sitting

When pediatric occupational therapist Christy Isbell presented a workshop at the annual conference of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) about teaching children who won’t sit still, more than two thousand early childhood professionals vied for space in the room. Across the hall, I was presenting a session on movement, and my audience didn’t even register in the hundreds.

I found this juxtaposition somewhat amusing. When you’re talking about young children who won’t sit still, you are pretty much talking about all young children. Isbell wasn’t there to tell people how to make children sit still, which is what I suspect the audience was expecting; she was explaining why so many young ones can’t sit still and why it’s an unrealistic expectation. Meanwhile, I was offering practical strategies for dealing with this reality.

Sure, we’ve all seen those old photos of elementary school classrooms from years gone by—the ones with children seated primly in neat rows. Having “control” of the children and requiring them to learn via their eyes, their ears, and the seats of their pants was perceived as the best way to provide an education. And the theory may have been logical back then, when educators didn’t have any research to prove there might be a better way. But today we do!

Today we have brain research demonstrating that sitting in a chair increases fatigue because our bodies are designed to move, not sit. Eric Jensen has written extensively about this issue. He confirms that sitting for more than ten minutes at a time reduces our awareness of physical and emotional sensations. Also, the pressure on a person’s spinal discs is 30 percent greater while the person is sitting than while the person is standing. None of this contributes to optimal health or learning. Nor does it contribute to optimal behavior. Jensen (2000, 30) writes, “These problems reduce concentration and attention, and ultimately result in discipline problems.” So why would we want children to sit more often?

Jensen is just one of many educators and researchers to ring the warning bell about the folly of sitting to learn. As far back as 1929, Alfred North Whitehead (1967, 50), wrote in The Aims of Education and Other Essays, “I lay it down as an educational axiom that in teaching you will come to grief as soon as you forget that your pupils have bodies.” Recently, an educator told me the same thing in the simplest of terms. He said, “If you don’t let them move, you’ve already lost them.”

Despite the brain research now available, today’s early childhood classrooms too often still resemble those elementary school classrooms of old, with young children sitting rather than playing and moving. Why do we imagine that sitting equals learning? Why do we insist on pretending that children exist only from the neck up—that the mind and body have absolutely nothing to do with each other? As Isbell said to me in an interview for BAM! Radio Network (the largest education radio network online), “Who’s to say we have to sit down to learn? Why can’t we stand to learn? Why can’t we lay on the floor on our tummies to learn? Why can’t we sit in the rocking chair to learn? There are lots of other simple movement strategies. Just changing the position can make a big difference” (Pica, accessed 2019e).

Here’s an example of that. In one study, researchers equipped four fourth-grade classrooms with standing desks, and what happened was amazing. Even though the desks were equipped with stools, 70 percent of the kids never used the stools, and the other 30 percent used the stools sometimes but stood the majority of the time. The end result? Increased attention, alertness, engagement, and on-task behavior (Dornhecker et al. 2015). It’s a teacher’s dream!

Of course, standing desks are expensive, but that doesn’t mean you can’t allow the children to stand as needed. You could seat children who need to move at the outside of desk clusters so they don’t distract others. Or, better still, offer flexible seating, with tables, balance balls, beanbag chairs, rocking chairs, stools, tires, and comfortable rugs, and each day let the children choose the sitting (or sprawling) option that best meets their needs. Because they’re being given that responsibility and choice, they will take the decision seriously, and there will be fewer behavioral issues.

Often preschool teachers argue that they must get children used to sitting because the children are going to have to sit in kindergarten and beyond. Unfortunately, it’s true that children will have to become accustomed to sitting in school until policy makers begin paying attention to the research and opt for an education system that aligns with how kids learn. But it’s also true that kids will eventually have to learn how to drive. Does that mean we should put them behind the wheel while they’re still preschoolers?

The solution to the “problem” of children who won’t sit still is to allow children to be children. Specifically, adults must first allow them to develop their proprioceptive and vestibular senses. Proprioception is awareness of the location of one’s body parts and of one’s body in relation to the environment. With a properly developed proprioceptive sense, children are able to perform tasks such as feeding themselves without having to watch their fork travel to their mouth or are able to climb a staircase without looking at their feet. The vestibular sense detects gravity and motion to create an internal sense of balance. It coordinates with the other senses to help a person get upright and stay that way. With a properly developed vestibular sense, children will have, among other things, better balance, visual tracking, and self-regulation. When both the proprioceptive and vestibular senses are developed, sitting is much easier for children.

The critical period for development of these senses is before the age of six. And the best way to promote their development is to allow children to move—to jump, bounce, spin, swing, and hang upside down. Yesterday’s children, who had far more unstructured time and access to equipment such as swings and monkey bars, had ample opportunity for these experiences. Today’s children, many of whom are enrolled in school and centers from infancy and who are leading highly scheduled lives, are being denied these opportunities. It’s no wonder they have trouble sitting still.

What We Know about Fidgeting

When the children are sitting, do you find yourself asking some of them to “please sit still” over and over again? Or, at the very least, are you internally begging them to stop fidgeting?

There’s no doubt that fidgeting can be distracting. But too often it’s seen as misbehaving. Many a child has been moved down on those awful behavior charts for fidgeting. And some, unable to comply with their teachers’ wishes, are made to feel like failures at the ripe old age of three, four, or five. No child should ever feel like a failure. Nor should a child get coded as having attention issues or be labeled as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), simply because she can’t sit still in school—in other words, because she is a child.

While some children may be able to comply with a request to sit still, others simply cannot. In general, children are not suited to sitting still. In fact, the human body functions best when it is able to move.

Pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom is among those experts who contend that children simply don’t engage in enough movement anymore, and that’s why children are fidgeting more than ever. Lack of movement, she says, has resulted in children having underdeveloped balance systems and strength. She writes, “Children are going to class with bodies that are less prepared to learn than ever before. With sensory systems not quite working right, they are asked to sit and pay attention. Children naturally start fidgeting, in order to get the movement their body so desperately needs and is not getting enough of to ‘turn their brain on.’ What happens when the children start fidgeting? We ask them to sit still and pay attention; therefore, their brain goes back to ‘sleep’” (Hanscom 2014).

Obviously, sleeping brains cannot manage optimal learning or behavior. In a 2008 study, researchers found that children need to move in order to focus during a complicated mental task. Dr. Mark Rapport, the psychology professor who supervised this study, explained that this is why some children have to move while reading or doing math but are able to sit still when watching an appealing movie. Many adults believe that if children are able to sit still during a “preferred” activity such as watching a movie, then they can do it at will. Rapport says this isn’t the case; when children are involved in an experience using working memory and cognitive processing, they need to move to be able to focus (Bright, accessed 2018).

A 2015 study reported that for children with attention disorders, hyperactive movements like moving and spinning in a chair meant better performance on tasks requiring concentration. Dr. Dustin Sarver, the ADHD researcher who led the study, said that when the kids were moving, they were increasing their alertness and that small physical motions awaken the nervous system in a way that’s similar to how the medication Ritalin works (Sarver et al. 2015; Kamenetz 2015). According to Sarver, when we tell children, “‘Sit down, don’t move, stop tapping, stop bouncing,’ the kids are spending all their mental energy concentrating on that rule.” And that prevents them from focusing on whatever task we’re asking them to do (Kamenetz 2015).

The solution for all children is to ensure that they have more opportunities to move and play in early childhood settings. One way to provide such opportunities is by offering learning centers through which the children rotate and by providing active learning across the curriculum. (More information on active learning follows in the next section.) You’ll also find ideas in this book for brain breaks, which invite the children to get up from their seats periodically and get the blood flowing. And recess must take place at least once a day for every single child. It should never be skipped for any reason or withheld as punishment. (For more on recess, see pages 24–25 and 87–89.

Here is a list of classroom items for managing fidgeting, recommended by teachers. If you use these, along with the activities in this book, you will have increased attention, alertness, engagement, and on-task behavior:

• bike inner tubes wrapped around the legs of chairs, allowing kids to bounce their legs

• partially inflated beach balls placed on seats, allowing children to wiggle as needed

• chewing gum (Although gum chewing in school is controversial, one teacher told me this was the only solution she could find for a child who was constantly mouthing things. She received permission from the child’s parents, and the problem was solved.)

• coloring books (Just because a child is coloring doesn’t mean she isn’t listening. In fact, this may be her best bet for paying attention.)

• stress balls, koosh balls, and putty for squeezing

• fidget spinners and other fidget toys (used only in the manner and by the ages for which they are intended)

Finally, we need to address the much-loved practice of asking children to sit “crisscross-applesauce” during story or circle time. When children are unable to comply—when they become restless and wiggly—we tend to see it as misbehavior and as a violation of the rules. Instead, we need to examine why such rules exist—rules that run contrary to what we know about children, sitting, and fidgeting. If we understand that children are much more likely to be engaged when they’re comfortable, why would we insist that they assume a position that perhaps isn’t comfortable at all, often for many long minutes at a time?

Personally, I would feel as though I were losing my mind if someone asked me to sit for more than a single minute cross-legged, with my back straight, and with my hands in my lap. And I suspect a great many adults would feel the same way. So why do we require this of children, who are far more likely than adults to be unable to contain their energy when they’re uncomfortable? If we allow children to sit, lie, or stand in whatever way feels good to them, fidgeting will be far less likely to occur. And we’ll have engaged and happy children, which should be our goal.

What We Know about the Need for Active Learning

In the past, based on what they knew about and observed in young children, preschool and kindergarten teachers designed their programs to meet children’s developmental needs. Play and active learning were considered key tools to accommodate those needs and to facilitate children’s education. These were some typical activities in the earliest years:

• sorting and stacking blocks and other manipulatives (providing mathematical knowledge)

• singing and dancing or acting out stories (emergent literacy)

• growing plants from seeds, exploring the outdoor environment, and investigating at sand and water tables (scientific knowledge)

• trying on various roles and interacting with one another at housekeeping and other dramatic-play centers (social studies)

Not only were there fewer behavioral issues in the past than what today’s educators are witnessing, but active experiences like those listed also meant the children were seldom sitting. Movement offered them more opportunity for learning and greater retention than worksheets or listening only can provide. That’s because the more senses we use in the learning process, the more information we retain (Willis 2016).

For example, when children are given the chance to physically demonstrate verbs like stomp, pounce, stalk, or slither—or adjectives such as smooth, strong, gentle, or enormous—word comprehension is immediate and long-lasting. The same is true when they have the opportunity to move slowly while listening to slow music. In all these instances, the words are alive and in context, as opposed to being a mere collection of letters. Letters are abstract symbols, and young children are not yet ready for abstract thought.

Similarly, if children physically demonstrate high and low positioning and wide and narrow shapes, they develop a much better understanding of these quantitative concepts and the concept of opposites than do children who merely see or hear the words and their definitions. When they act out the lyrics to “Ten in the Bed,” they can see that ten minus one leaves nine. (“There were ten in the bed, and the little one said, ‘Roll over! Roll over!’ So they all rolled over, and one fell out!”) The same understanding and engagement result when children have personal experience with scientific concepts like gravity, flotation, evaporation, magnetics, balance and stability, and action and reaction. Understanding and engagement lead both to greater academic success and a more positive learning environment.

Active learning also provides valuable experience with body awareness and spatial awareness. This may not seem to be a vital benefit, but it is. When children move over, under, aro...