Adding Movement to the Classroom Changes Everything What This High School Math Teacher Discovered

Hi, my name's Kate. I'm high school math teacher in the middle of my 19th year of teaching. For today's video, thought that would do just little bit of information about, you know, we're at the end of the year. The students are getting squirrely. The students are done. Yes, even those seniors, right? Senioritis is strong with all of the kids, even with my juniors. And so, thought that would talk today just about how to add movement to the classroom. And, you know, as we are at the end of the year and they're getting squirrely, they don't want to sit down, and their attention spans are at zero. And so, just adding little bit of movement to the classroom throughout the lesson, feel really helps the students kind of re-center, refocus, and then they are good to go. One way that like to add movement to the classroom, and this is when need to do big review with my students, that is using scavenger hunts. And so, scavenger hunts, the students have set of cards that are hanging around the room, right? They can be, you know, task card type cards, but scavenger hunts are going to have question, and then they're going to have little previous answer. And it just leads them around the room kind of, you know, in little trail, little path, and they work through the problems. So, when give these to my students, so first of all, if don't have time to laminate them, and let's be real, guys, the end of the year, who has time to laminate anything? So, just throw these in page protectors, and then tape them around the room, and then pull them out of the page protectors when I'm done. So, that is the lazy way of laminating things when you don't have time. So, hang these around the room, and then do have for this particular scavenger hunt that just used yesterday with my college algebra kids, do have record sheet, but you can also just have them right on piece of paper. And so, if the student started on question they're going to do the work, and if the answer for their question that they got was found on card they're going to put here, they're going to do the work, and if that leads them to again, they're going to put here, they're going to do the work, and all the way at the end. and so at the end, the answer to this last card, let's say the end the last card they were on was should lead them back to that very first card that they started. So, this is nice because it's self-checking. If they don't see their answer in one of the previous answers, they know that they made mistake someplace. make my students work in the groups that they're seated with, and tell them don't care if you work faster than your team, you guys are working as fast as the slowest member of your team. don't want to see you guys wandering around and doing things on your own. So, this is really good way of getting students up, getting students moving around. This is great review activity. Now, know what you're thinking. It's the end of the year, and now you're wanting students to be up and wandering around the classroom the whole time, and get it. you know, I've got seniors mostly, juniors. and for the most part, they're able to handle this. Now, if we're talking room of freshman at the end of the year, maybe scavenger hunt isn't exactly what you need because you cannot have your students up moving around. So, let's talk other ideas of things that if you don't want them up constantly moving around. Another favorite activity of mine that I've been using lot lately, especially in my quantitative reasoning class, are these round robin style activities. So, similar to the scavenger hunt in the fact that the students are working together. However, have Normally, have these in page protector, but have list of questions. Now, with quantitative reasoning, have one big question or like one big like story problem, and then they answer bunch of questions about this. With my other classes, it may just be the topic of, you know, rewriting from log to exponential, and then bunch of practice problems. can you know, it condensing logs and bunch of questions. And so, it doesn't have to be one big question or one big topic, you know, story problem with bunch of questions. You can just focus on one topic per station. The other thing that do is add to the back of that the answers so that as the students are working, they can check their answers. And so, have Now, this is just for quantitative reasoning. have very very small class, and this set of questions might take them 10 minutes, and only want to spend about 30 minutes on this review. So, sometimes it's not full class period review. And then so, will have my students work on this. I'll set timer for 10 minutes, and then when the timer goes up, everybody's going to rotate. And so, whatever student group of students was on the leasing cars, now they're going to get up, they're going to move to the next station. So, that's just little bit of movement, just they getting up from one group, moving to the other after 10 minutes or 8 minutes or whatever you have your timer set at. And then they're going to work on the next station. So, here's their questions about the Happy Widget Company, and then again, they can check their answers for those. So, simply having stations set up so the students are focused on group of problems, they're going to work together for specific amount of time, and then you're going to have them all at once get up, move to the next station. So, whereas the scavenger hunt, students are just moving as they need to from station to this to station, this is little bit more organized in the fact that students aren't just constantly moving around the room. They're going to work for 8 minutes, they're going to work for 10 minutes at one station. The whole class is going to get up, they're going to move to the next station. sit down, and then they're going to work for that 8 or for that 10 minutes, and then just kind of rinse and repeat. And really like this because it just breaks up that instead of working on, you know, 30, 50, whatever problems, they're going to work on just set amount of problems, focusing on those, and then they're going to get up, just get that little bit of movement out, break things up little. As they move, they just, you know, talk little bit, they may, you know, whatever. And then once they sit down and set that timer, I'm like, "Okay, timer starts." And then the class focuses again. So, that's really great way to add just little bit of movement if you feel like the scavenger hunts are little bit chaotic. So, stations activity, call these round robins. Absolutely love these as way to get movement in the classroom. Those first two activities for getting movement in the classroom definitely require lot more preparation ahead of time. Getting the scavenger hunts, creating the scavenger hunts, the same with those round robins, just, you know, doing all of that. So, if you are on time crunch or you're like, you know, can't dedicate that much time to review, another way that love having movement in the classroom is during classwork. So, sometimes when have the students work on whether it's warm-up or whether it's part of an classwork, maybe an investigation part of the activity, will have the students, okay, you're going to work on this and it even specifies it in the problem. Work on this, when you're done, you need to go check your answer. And then work on this question, when you're done, you need to go check your answer. And so, will just in the back of the classroom, you can't really see, but have number one on this one. And when the students flip it up, it's got the question. So, let me show you. So, here, the number one, and then when the students flip it up, you can see the question that they were working on, and just have the answers written down, and it even says on their classwork, just made my answer key, cut it apart, and then covered it up here. And it says, do not move on until you've checked your answers. So, the students are checking their answers. And then, the same thing, when they're done with number two, they go over to wherever number two is, they can flip that up, and then they can check their answers for number two. like this particular activity lot because it does few things. It puts some of that learning in the students' hands, knowing as I'm watching them, hey, who hasn't gone up yet to check number one? And can go check on those students and be like, you haven't done anything, let's go. Or you have done it, why don't you go check your answers? And so, they can. And again, it just gets those students up, moving around. Now, normally, would not put them this close together. would put one here and I'd put one on the other side of the room if only had few. That way, when students are done with one, and the faster students are done with two, don't have big clog up right here. If you have bigger class, you can put, you know, number one on two halves of the room and say, okay, if you're on this half of the room, this is where you're going to check your answers, and if you're on this half of the room, you're going to check your answers over here." And that would help. Haven't done that yet. with my classes of 30, that might not be bad idea, because sometimes I'll get like 12 kids up here all at once trying to check their answers. But overall, really like it because it just breaks up part of the lesson. It gets the students up. It gets them moving around just little bit. And it's just low stakes. They're just going to go check their answer. They don't need to tell anybody that they were right, that they were wrong. They're going to just check their answers. Now, when do this, tell them, don't want you to bring your pencil. You're just going to go check your answers. If you got something wrong, when you get back to your desk, then you can work on fixing it." So, great, very easy way of adding movement to the classroom without having to reinvent the wheel. also use version of this when am reviewing with my students. So, sometimes don't want to do the big reviews. Maybe don't have the energy for it, or really just need the students to buckle down and to work, or it's just class that can't handle one of those review games. And so, sometimes will take their review, and will just chunk it into pieces. So, this with my quantitative reasoning, they had one through five. They're going to work on those, and then it kind of changed topics. So, here are problems six and seven. And then they were going to do problems eight and 10, eight through 10, and then so on. would just have all of these taped up. And this one's even less fancy than the last one showed you, because this is just the paper have the answers on, and the students just flip it up, and this is all multiple choice. They can check their answers for that. And the same thing here. When they're done, they can come, and they can check their answers for those. So, try to chunk those either just couple of questions at time, or if there are few questions on one topic, like if we're doing logs, and it's here's our expanding ones, do the expand, go check your answers. And then here's the chunk that are condensing, go ahead and condense, check your answers, and then evaluate. Right? So, chunk those, and just print, make that copy of the key. don't put the work with these. Now, multiple choice, obviously, they could just copy those answers, but all of these are multiple choice right now. But, don't put the work if it's the open-ended type of questions because don't want them to just see all the work. want them to see, "Hey, got the answer wrong." and then go figure that out. So, that's another way that love adding movement into the classroom, and just put them on the back of my cupboards. Now, my cupboards right now have lot on there. I've got all of my TI buddies for spring up there, but also have here and here on the other side I've got some of my unit circle projects, so it's definitely little bit chaotic right now. When do something like this, will make sure that my cupboards are more clear off so that it's easier for the students to see. Now, mean, it's still pretty easy for them to see, but try to keep that little bit more clean when do those so that there's no issues with students saying that they didn't know where they were, they couldn't find them. But, that's just nice way to have students check answers to their review without constantly having to raise their hand and having you run around the room answering, "Is this correct? Is this correct?" All right? But, when do the reviews as well, tell the students they're not allowed to bring pencil over. They can only go over with their paper and check their answers to see if they're right because don't, again, want them writing down those answers. Now, obviously, multiple choice, they could just memorize the answers and write them down, and tell them, "If you do that, you know, that's just hurting you in the long run." but, for the most part, it works. And again, just that every few minutes get up, go check an answer, sit back down. That just kind of resets them and allows them to get little bit of energy out, and then they can keep working. I've also used that same strategy with warm-ups, especially if know don't have lot of time to go over the warm-up. Or, when give warm-up and I'm not here, will post the answers and tell the students, "When you've finished, go check your answers to the warm-up." So, just finding, especially at the end of the year, just finding ways to get students up and moving around, not necessarily the entire class period, even if it's just going to check one or two answers, just getting them up little bit once in while and moving around have found has really helped just kind of let the students expel little bit of energy and be able to refocus. would love to know what are some ways that you include movement in the classroom. Please share those in the comments because I'm always looking for new and fun and exciting ways to get students up and moving around and you know the more we share with each other the more we can hopefully get students little bit more excited about coming to class little bit more engaged in class and ultimately do better and maybe even like math little bit better. You know, who knows. If you guys enjoyed this video, please give it thumbs up. 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