What is kinesthetic learning, you ask? It means learning through movement, and it involves physically doing, touching, and interacting with the material. It’s an active learning strategy that works really well in engaging students and it helps them retain new knowledge a lot better than just sitting and doing worksheets or work in workbooks.
Since I’ve been a teacher, the use of laptops in school has increased. This is good, of course, because students need to be digitally literate. However, I feel like ever since COVID forced us to learn remotely, students have been sucked into their devices and they find it very hard to be away from them these days. But I could tell pretty quickly that learning from a device was not benefitting my students. So I’ve come up with a bunch of ways to do kinesthetic learning, aka learning through movement with them. Let me tell you all about it!
What does kinesthetic learning mean
Kinesthetic learning means that learners retain information better if they learn or practice it through physical activity, trial-and-error, and sensory movement. It means that students must use their whole body to get a grasp of a new thing you’re trying to teach them.
How does kinesthetic learning help students
Why is kinesthetic learning important? It’s because physical involvement creates a deeper comprehension. Think of the example of riding a bike. It’s only because a child tries and tries again that they learn how to eventually do it. It’s also true that if you engage multiple senses, it enhances your memory. That’s why noises or smells can transport you back to a fun, or not so fun, event in the past. In students, movement also helps students stay on task and it’s just interesting for them.
Ways to create kinesthetic learning in your classroom
Play Four Corners
Label the corners of your room with responses, such as agree, strongly agree, disagree, and strongly disagree if you want their opinions on a statement. Or 4 choices and students pick their favorite/the correct one/one they can explain back to you. For example, label each corner with an occupation and get students to choose their corner and argue which job is most interesting and why.
If you need a ready made game to use with your students, I’ve got a Four Corners game up in my store! Click here to check it out!
Statement carousel
Place statements, questions, or images around the room and get students to walk around and discuss them with each other. You can also have them write things in response, put sticky notes next to the prompt, or put stickers to show how they feel. For example, give students red and green stickers and get them to use them to show whether they agree or disagree with statements that are placed on the wall.
I got these stickers from Amazon to do this exact activity with my students next week, as I just inspired myself to do this again while I wrote this, lol 🙂
Sentence strips
Print sentences that reflect the topic you’re teaching in a large font and cut them into pieces. Then get students to piece them back together in groups. Good for word order work and other grammar topics. In the same way, you can cut up pieces of a larger text and get students to order them correctly.
Relay game/ Running dictation
Make groups. Put a text on one wall and get students to stand at the opposite wall. Each team may only send one person at a time to run to the text, remember it, and relay the information to their team for the team to copy on their sheet. You can also hang up a text with grammar errors in it, and each student can only correct one mistake before they tag a team mate.
Human timeline
Each student represents a part of something and they must stand in the correct order. Can be paragraphs of a text, sentence parts, actual timeline for a novel’s events.
Charades
Get students to act out concepts, verbs, vocabulary words, scenes from a novel, events in a written or spoken text they read or listened to.
Games
Get students to match words with their visual meaning with games like memory and dominoes. They have to physically lay the two together. I love dominoes because a set must physically become a circle (or square) to get all the matches matched. My prepositions dominoes game is a great one for my beginner students.
Stand or sit
Give students two choices and tell them to stand if they choose number 1 and to sit if they choose number 2. Based on responses you can ask them to explain.
Use a ball
Get students to catch a ball and then they have to do something, like give an answer to a question, or an association they have with a topic, or words that come to mind. Or toss the ball to a student and that student needs to continue a sentence, or a story. You can also get students to explain vocabulary words you ask for each toss.
Use a soft foam ball of course, like this one off Amazon!
Tips for kinesthetic learning activities
You know now why movement is important in the classroom, and what types of activities you can do to get students moving. But before you even start it’s important you tell students the rules. What do you expect from them and what do you NOT want? And always reflect back on the activity once it’s over so that students feel a clear end to what they just did.
You’ve got this, now give it a try!
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