by Anne Green Gilbert
Movement is the key to learning. I first became aware of this as a third-grade student in elementary school. My kinesthetic intelligence flourished in a classroom-where movement was central to my teacher's curriculum. I remember a sort of paradise where everyone liked school that year, we all got along, and the knowledge imparted is still in my memory bank forty years later.
Movement is the key to learning. Oddly enough, it was when I became a third-grade teacher myself fifteen years later that I remembered this concept and used movement and dance to save myself from drowning in a classroom so heterogeneous I felt I was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. Spelling words by forming the letters with bodies, forming punctuation marks and expressing the feeling of sentences through movement, learning multiplication by moving in sets of threes and fours, discovering the difference between lunar and solar eclipses through planet dances, and choreographing our way across the Oregon Trail somehow made everyone equal. The gifted children discovered a new and exciting way to learn, the slower learners quickly became actively engaged and successful, the non-English speaking students could finally understand the curriculum through our new nonverbal approach. Instead of dreading the long school day, we eagerly awaited our next movement experience. Attendance went way up; test scores rose substantially: there was laughter; racial tension dissipated. We became a homogeneous company of classmates dancing our way through the third-grade curriculum.
Movement is the key to learning. I so firmly believe this concept that I decided to do a research project to prove it. Of course many renowned educators and scientists had noted the educational benefits of movement for years. The names of Jean Piaget, Rudolph Laban, and Marian Diamond come to mind. Five years after my own experience as a third-grade teacher in Illinois, I was training teachers at the University of Washington and received a federally funded grant to conduct research in the Seattle Public Schools. During the 1977 school year, 250 students from four elementary schools studied language arts concepts through movement and dance activities for twenty weeks. The third grade students involved in the study increased their MAT scores by 13 percent from fall to spring, while the district wide average showed a decrease of 2 percent! The primary grade project students also showed a great improvement in test scores. Most significant was the direct relationship the research showed between the amount of movement the classroom teacher used and the percentage increase of students' test scores.
Movement is the key to learning. Forty years after my own third-grade experience, I am still using movement and dance to teach people of all ages, and every single day I see some little miracle happen. Students cannot sit still for very long before the blood and oxygen flow to their brains significantly slows down, thereby slowing down the learning process. Bringing dance into your classroom will not only increase learning, but will make your classroom a healthier, happier place to learn and teach.
This is something I look forward to every year! We have such a great staff of teachers and I really enjoy them as women, not just because of the wonderful job they do teaching your children. We have been going to LePeep in Carmel for at least the past 8 years. Every first Saturday in December you will find us there! It is a great time for us to just relax and enjoy each others company! We catch up on what is going on in everyone's family and then share funny stories from our classes. 
