Why can’t students just learn the same way all of us did in school?
We sat. The teacher talked and wrote on the board. We solved problems. We came back and did it again the next day. We all did just fine.
Why can’t we do what we’ve always done? Because…we know more now about the way the brain learns. We know more about the needs of students. We know that we must differentiate instruction in our classrooms so that we can meaningfully and respectfully challenge all students. We can’t do what we’ve always done, because we can do better!!!
Not all students learn best with their bottoms flat on a chair listening to the teacher (even if the teacher is using technology to “spice” up the lesson via a document viewer or smart board). A great number of students sitting in our classrooms today are kinesthetic learners.
What is a kinesthetic learner? In her article, “Helping Kinesthetic Learners Succeed,” Shannon Hutton states,
“…many students…learn by doing and need to move around the classroom and touch things to better understand the lessons. They have difficulty sitting at their desks for extended periods of time. These students aren’t being difficult, they just learn differently.”
If you’d like to learn more, Hutton’s article describes characteristics of the kinesthetic learner and teaching strategies to help the kinesthetic learner.
[http://www.education.com/magazine/article/kinesthetic_learner/]
I was reminded of the power of movement when working with a first grade class a few weeks ago. The concept being explored was counting change from the penny to the quarter. I placed varied activities for counting change in the four stations, but the most powerful activity was at the Teacher Time Station.
I placed several vertical masking tape lines across the width of the classroom. On the number lines I drew slash marks and placed enlarged pictures of coins next to each. The objective was to have the students jump and count change at the same time. The activity Money Moves! builds on the prior experience students have counting by 5’s, 10’s, and 1’s.
To truly develop a student’s ability to count in multiples, the student must have opportunities to count by 5’s and 10’s beginning with any number. If the teacher begins with 3 and asks the students to count by 5’s they will begin to see a pattern almost immediately. Stop and try it with someone near you. It’s amazing to watch how this number sense is developed in a first or second grade student.
How do you count by 10’s? In most classroom situations the students begin with 0 and count 10, 20, 30…100. Instead, begin with the number 42 and count by 10’s till you reach 142. The learner will begin to see the pattern in this type of counting, too. I have to say that this type of number sense activity has had many students tell me, “You can’t do that!” or “Are you sure we can start with any number we want—I thought we had to start with 0.”
With a strong foundation for counting beginning with any number, the counting of money on a vertical line can begin. In Money Moves! the student looks at the first coin and says that amount as they jump and land on the coin. Then they look at the next coin and say the amount when counting on that much more. After the student jumps and counts, they go to a nearby table and create the amount they just jumped with real coins. They practice using their fingers to “jump” and count the coins the same way they jumped and counted on the vertical coin line. The next week I’ll place this activity into the Manipulatives Station and ask the students to draw what they jumped. This will take them through the stages of learning a complex concept from the concrete to the pictorial to the abstract.
Every time I use the vertical counting coins line I see more success in the understanding of how to count change and being able to repeat the process with real coins. A page with pictures of coins grouped together just doesn’t work the same way…and, even if you aren’t a kinesthetic learner, it’s just more fun to move!
I don’t know if any secondary teachers read to the end of this blog post. If they did, I’d like to pose this question. “Does a student, who is kinesthetic and needs to learn by doing, moving, and experiencing, change when they reach junior high and high school?”
This question, and many others, were asked by a secondary math department in Orlando, Florida at Lake Nona Middle/High School. They are doing amazing things with their students and I can’t wait to see the impact of their hard work!