For enhanced brain power, health, and energy, nothing beats exercise.
Feeling low? Go take a walk.
Stumped? Go workout.
Tired and bored? Grab a ball and play something.
Exercise gets the blood flowing and clears the clogs and toxins. Movement activates the senses which in turn stimulate the brain. Motor performance challenges the brain creating new and stronger connections.
Movement and brain development go hand in hand.
As an infant develops motor milestones such as crawling or walking, parallel changes occur in the brain. Do the brain changes happen first, causing the development of the motor abilities or do the motor skills rewire the brain? Currently we can't say.
One of the first tasks the newborn faces is moving against gravity. The first year of life is all about learning to control the movement of eyes, arms, tongue, torso and legs, in order to focus and follow, reach and grasp, eat and speak, roll over, sit up, stand up and walk.
A baby grabs, shakes, mouths, bangs, and drops a rattle in the process of discovering all of the things this interesting object can do. Sitting up and crawling gives the child a new perspective on the world. A moving child sees the world in three dimensions. Concepts of position in space develop naturally in the moving child.
Asymetric bilateral movement (crawling, climbing, rubbing your tummy and patting your head) grows connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. When the right and left hemispheres are better connected higher level thinking can take place.
Why, then, would we put children in chairs for six hours a day and call it education?
How about spelling races and math hop scotch instead? PE teachers should work with classroom teachers to integrate academics with physical education.
Here are some academic movement games I have used.
- Go to another room and find the answer and bring it back. I put number cards out on a table and students had to find two numbers that add up to a given number and bring them back.
- Relay Race in which teams send one player at a time to the board to complete the task and return to send the next player. It works well with math but can be used with any subject.
- Toss a ball with math problems or words to define printed on it. Student solves the one that is facing him when he catches it. He then throws it back or to another student.
- Stations in an obstacle course at which the students must stop and complete an academic task before moving on. This is great for individualizing/differentiating instruction as you can have a different task/worksheet for each student.
- Read it and toss it, in which players read a word, definition, or fact on a ping pong ball then toss it into a basket. You could use pieces of paper and have the students crumple them ant then toss.
- Scavenger Hunt Test in which students search for questions in a defined area. When they find a question, they answer it on an answer sheet they carry with them.
- Spelling Hop - students hop from one letter to another spelling the given word in order. Letters can be chalk on a sidewalk, tape on the floor, or cut from rubber.
- Recite times tables while jumping rope.
- Silent reading on an exercise bike.
Sandra Aamodt, editor of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton University stated on The New York Times’s Op-Ed page, physical exercise “improves what scientists call ‘executive function,’ the set of abilities that allows you to select behavior that’s appropriate to the situation, inhibit inappropriate behavior and focus on the job at hand in spite of distractions. Executive function includes basic functions like processing speed, response speed and working memory, the type used to remember a house number while walking from the car to a party.”
