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By Emma McDonald

What can you do for students who can’t seem to sit still? Get them moving! Look over your lesson plans and ask yourself, how can I get my students moving during this lesson?

Ideas:

• Relay race between teams to spell words, solve math problems, answer trivia/quiz questions
• Basketball or toss the ball games — when students get an answer correct, they get to toss the ball in a trash can. If you can go outside to do this activity, let them try to make a basket on the basketball court. Another option would be to kick the soccer ball into the goal.
• Rotating Centers with short activities to keep the students moving.
• Use sentence strips to let students create a gigantic timeline or T-chart on the floor or on the board. Students must place their information (on the sentence strip) in the correct place within the chart, etc. Small sticker magnets can be used to place the strips on your blackboard/whiteboard.
• Utilize drawing and coloring for illustrations of information/ skills learned. Yes, even the big kids like to draw and color! Don’t discount drawing and coloring if you teach Jr. High and High School students.
• Act out scenes from the history or science textbook. Student groups can create a skit showing their knowledge of the information and present it to the class. Have student groups take a section of the chapter and rewrite it as a script or as a simple story.
• Do exercises in between each lesson or activity. This can be as simple as: reach high into the sky, show me your spirit fingers, touch the floor, march in place like soldiers, etc.
• As you read the textbook, have students get up and move to the seat behind them after each paragraph or end of subsection.  Any kind of rotation where students read, speak, write, and move will keep them on their toes.
• Do your lesson with students standing in a large circle. Fire questions at them randomly (are you in my line of fire?).
• Allow extremely active boys (and girls) the flexibility of standing and “wiggling” at their desk while they work. Shaking a leg, tapping a foot, or bouncing up & down can help dispell the “wiggles” and keep a student focused on their work. You may want these students to stay near the back of the room where they will not distract others.
• Another option is to give active students a small soft ball that they can squeeze in their hand while they are working.

What do you do to keep students moving in your classroom?

Welcome to the Inspiring Teachers Blog! I hope we’ll be able to use this as a forum to discuss what’s going on in the classroom and to provide help and support for one another. Be on the lookout for author blogs as well as site blogs. Feel free to comment on our blogs, the website, our newsletters, or just post a new topic for discussion.