Integrating Movement
Ensuring for a high quality physical education program is important. Equally important is ensuring that students are active across the school day and not just in gym class. Research shows that kids who are physically active are not only healthier, but are also likely to perform better academically and short activity breaks during the school day can improve concentration, behavior, and enhance learning. In short, school-based physical activity is valuable exercise—it aids cognitive development, increases engagement and motivation, and is essential to a whole child approach to education.
Whether it be extracurricular, cocurricular, or embedded in the academic curriculum itself, integrating movement across the school day in elementary school, the middle grades, and high school can be used to maximize learning and help ensure that students are healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.
From the Whole Child Blog
Keep Kids Moving and Motivated to Learn
By the time students graduate from high school, they have spent thousands of hours in a classroom, most likely sitting. That's a lot of sitting. Integrating movement and physical activity in the classroom and across the school day gives children's bodies and minds the exercise they need to fuel the brain with oxygen, creates enthusiasm and energy, and maximizes learning during academic lessons.
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Podcast
More Than Just Gym: Integrating Movement Across the School Day
In this episode of the Whole Child Podcast, we discuss new ways to encourage movement and how schools are bringing physical activity out of the gym and into the classroom to maximize learning and well-being.
