Highlighting Sleep as a beneficial enhancer for successful development in both physical and cognitive skills in my last post brought up a personal experience that I had years ago. Circumstances during my early teaching career steered me into the middle of a fourth grade classroom to take over the teaching duties at mid-year!
During the process of learning what the needs of the students were, I discovered their lack of writing skills even though their reading skills were quite good. To best address this need, I structured a “return to traditional grammar” skills that involved a morning session of diagraming sentences, structuring paragraphs and learning all the “parts of speech” like verbs, adverbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, etc.
After a few weeks, I decided to add an afternoon session of
“creative writing” so that students would have to transfer their knowledge of
“sentence and paragraph structure” learned in the mornings, with actual short
stories or essays.
I would read a short story (started with James Thurber’s
Carnival) from selected authors and read aloud to the students. Afterwards, I
gave them a “theme” based on the type of story I read to them. The students
struggled to remember what I read and had a tough time composing their
thoughts.
Then, one day after their ONCE WEEKLY P.E. session, I read
them a story and gave them a theme for their essay/short story. NOT ONLY did
they pay close attention to the story, they wrote furiously for about 25
minutes with INCREDIBLE skill and creative thinking.
So, each day, before this Creative Writing session, I had
them go outside to the Quad in the middle of the school, run a lap and then we
did a few relay races involving “movement skills” in an up and back
(example>>>forwards skipping—backwards skipping, hopping, etc.)
manner, then return to the classroom
and directly into our 30 minutes of Creative Writing.
Since then, every athlete and/or student I have worked with
has heard me say “THE SPOKEN WORD IS NOT THE WRITTEN WORD!”
You will not believe
how many college athletes I woke up to the “secret” that "IN ORDER TO WRITE WELL"
(not good), they NEEDED TO READ
MORE!!
So, in sharing my early teaching “discovery” about teaching writing, I want to share that I ALSO learned how much physical
activity enhanced the ability of the students to “pay attention, focus and then think critically and creatively!
PLEASE READ THE
STUDIES/ARTICLES BELOW THAT WILL HOPEFULLY DRIVE HOME THE IMPORTANCE OF DAILY
PHYSICAL EDUCATION THAT INVOLVES MOVEMENT WITH MOVEMENT SKILLS as well as
adding BOOKS, paper magazines and News Papers to their DAILY reading.
In addition, I would also suggest reading a
variety of writing styles and sources of information in BOOK or Paper form to
supplement the “web-based” info.
If your children ARE
not getting daily physical skill activity, then push for them to get at least
15 to 20 minutes a day. Remember RECESS?? It used to be about 10-15 minutes of
“furious” movement” and “play” before “having” to go back into the classroom.
THERE WAS A REASON for that!
NOW, GO OUT AND JOG FOR
20 min., then READ THE ARTICLES BELOW.
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Why You Remember Less When You Read
from a Screen
August 23, 2014,
11:00 AM
There are undeniable advantages to carrying a whole
library on your Kindle or tablet computer but retaining the information you
read doesn't seem to be one of them. Recent
studies agree that when it comes to recalling information, you're probably
ahead to read printed material like bound books, paper journals, and print
magazines. In one study that asked Italian college students to
read a 28-page story and then place 14 plot events in correct order, Kindle
readers performed significantly worse.
Researchers suggest that we have a more difficult
time recalling digital information because it has no permanent physical
location:
"Both
anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate
a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text
it appeared. ... 'We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the
start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a
similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth
Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier
chapters.'"
On the
other hand, our digital devices never forget. Information that never dies,
forever accessible by practically everyone on the planet, poses some
interesting problems for a society:
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Motor skills and school performance in children with daily physical education in school - a 9-year intervention study.
Authors
Ericsson I, et al.
Journal: Scand J Med Sci Sports. 2014 Apr;24(2):273-8. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-0838.2012.01458.x. Epub 2012 Apr 9.
Abstract:The aim was to study long-term effects on motor skills and school performance of increased physical education (PE). All pupils born 1990-1992 from one school were included in a longitudinal study over nine years. An intervention group (n = 129) achieved daily PE (5 × 45 min/week) and if needed one extra lesson of adapted motor training. The control group (n = 91) had PE two lessons/week. Motor skills were evaluated by the Motor Skills Development as Ground for Learning observation checklist and school achievements by marks in Swedish, English, Mathematics, and PE and proportion of pupils who qualified for upper secondary school.
In school year 9 there were motor skills
deficits in 7% of pupils in the intervention group compared to 47% in the
control group (P < 0.001),
96% of the pupils in
the intervention group compared to 89% in the control group (P < 0.05)
qualified
for upper secondary school.
The sum of evaluated marks was higher among boys in the
intervention group than in the control group (P < 0.05). The sum of marks was also higher
in pupils with no motor skills deficit than among pupils with motor skills
deficits (P < 0.01),
as was the proportion of pupils who qualified for upper secondary
school (97% vs 81%, P < 0.001).
Daily PE and adapted motor skills training during the compulsory school
years is a feasible way to improve not only motor skills but also school
performance and the proportion of pupils who qualify for upper secondary
school.
© 2012 John Wiley & Sons A/S.
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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American Teens Are Becoming Even
Wimpier Than Before
by
Nancy Shute
Pickup
basketball may be losing out to computer games.
If
you think that teenagers are becoming weaklings, you're right.
Less than half of youths
ages 12 to 15 are even close to being aerobically fit, according to data
released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That's down from 52 percent
of youths in 1999 to 2000, the last time this survey was conducted. It measures
"adequate" levels of cardiorespiratory fitness, which children need
not only for sports but for good health.
And that was true regardless
of a child's race and family income.
Girls were particularly out
of shape, with just 34 percent of them having adequate cardiovascular health,
compared with 50 percent of boys. But 50 percent isn't so great.
"It's
frightening," , an assistant professor at the Dell Children's Medical
Center in Austin, tells Shots. Children tend to be less physically active as
they become teenagers, Pont says, because there are fewer opportunities for
organized sports, and less gym class too.
But given the nation's
obesity epidemic, teenagers need to be more active, not less, says Pont, who
was not involved in the "This may result in our childhood obesity epidemic
getting worse; "The increase in childhood obesity may have peaked,
according to released last year by the CDC, at least in very young children.
Even if that's true, Pont says, "the place they're stabilizing is still a
horrible place to be." As medical director for the Austin Independent
School District,
Pont has been active in
making the point that adding physical activity to the school day actually
improves standardized test scores and reduces behavior problems. But many school districts
haven't gotten that message.
"I can't sit in a chair
for eight hours a day and be functional," he notes. And neither, he adds,
can teenagers.
Less than half of youths
ages 12 to 15 have an adequate level of aerobic fitness, down from 65 percent a
decade ago.
CDC/NCHS, National Health and
Nutrition Examination Survey and NHANES National Youth Fitness Survey
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Ever seen a teacher or camp counselor make the whole class do jumping jacks before beginning a lesson? It wasn’t just a ploy to exhaust the kids hyped up on Pixy Stix.
A 2012 study showing the academic benefits of short spurts of aerobic exercise for low-income kids sparked a movement among primary schools to add more exercise to the school day.
The results were so convincing that study co-author Michele Tine, a researcher at Dartmouth College, decided to test the same intervention on college-age students. The most recent paper, published this week in Frontiers in Psychology, showed that just 12 minutes of aerobic exercise could increase attention and reading comprehension for all students. Most importantly, the effect was so strong for low-income students that the exercise effectively closed the pre-existing gap between scores of low-income and high-income students.
In the new study, 85 participants aged 17 to 21 were separated into high-income (above 175 percent of the federal poverty line) and low-income (below 133 percent) groups. They were randomly assigned to experimental or control conditions.
While the pre-test indicated that low-income students lagged behind high-income students in attention scores, low-income students’ scores improved so much after exercise that the gap was effectively erased.
The experimental group jogged in place for 12 minutes while staying within their individual target heart rate range. The control group sat and watched a 12-minute video about the benefits of exercise.
The study measured students’ selective visual attention (SVA), or the ability to focus on visual targets while ignoring irrelevant stimuli. It’s well established that SVA is essential to academic learning. Students took SVA tests before the exercise or video, immediately afterward, and 45 minutes after that.
All participants who exercised saw significant improvement in SVA scores from pre-test to post-test, while control group scores held steady. The exercise group sustained their high scores even after 45 minutes—a common duration for high school and college courses, Tine notes. The findings extended to reading comprehension scores, as well.
While the pre-test indicated that low-income students lagged behind high-income students in SVA, low-income students’ scores improved so much after exercise that the gap was effectively erased.
So why did exercise have a much larger effect on low-income students? One theory is that low-income students simply had more room to improve. Tine hypothesizes that chronic stress was a major factor. Chronic stress and aerobic exercise both affect the same physiological systems, and the chronic stress of poverty has been shown to affect cognitive processes. Students who reported higher chronic stress levels saw greater SVA score improvement than those who reported less chronic stress. And, unsurprisingly, low-income students tended to have higher chronic stress than high-income students.
This study represents a significant breakthrough for educators trying to improve outcomes for low-income college students—the intervention is brief enough and cheap enough to be realistically implemented.
Twelve minutes of exercise could not only keep college students awake during lecture and help them burn off last night’s Cup o’ Noodles, it could also shrink the persistent achievement gap that plagues American education.
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