A memory strategy that gets things moving!
Just like any of us, our students get bored with sitting in their seats for hours at a time. We can use this to our benefit – incorporating movement can be powerful for enhancing retention and learning. Movement is an important memory strategy as it provides greater levels of oxygen to the brain and involves multiple areas of the brain in the memory process.
Ways to incorporate movement into your lessons include:
- Act out vocabulary words with your students.
- Create gestures that represent key people, places, or facts from the lesson.
- Teach sign language for learning vocabulary and spelling words.
- Using sports for memorization:
- If you can get access to your school’s gym or an outdoor basketball hoop – or even a “kiddie” hoop with Nerf balls in your own classroom – make a game out of stating a fact and then shooting a basket. The rules can be whatever you decide to be most appropriate and get all students involved. The important thing is the movement, fun, and challenge in the activity. If students are divided up into teams, they can help one another, enhancing the learning activity by having students teach each other – without even realizing it!
- If soccer or another sport is easier (for example, if you can’t get access to a basketball hoop, but you can get access to a grassy field), you can use that sport as the foundation of the exercise. As long as memorizing information is a part of the rules of the game, you can use whatever rules you’d like.
Here’s an example from my own experience: I had an adult martial arts student who was having trouble remembering the Kung Fu forms from one lesson to the next. As an experiment, I had him warm up for a half hour before the lesson. After he started walking the treadmill before each lesson, he started remembering the forms better and advancing much more quickly.
An oxygenated brain “remembers” better.