What could movement possibly have to do with learning? After all, schools – where most of the child’s learning is supposed to take place – are our prime promoters of inactivity. (“Sit still.” “Stop squirming.” “Don’t run.” “Stay in your seat.”) If movement were critical to learning, wouldn’t the schools be employing it?

Certainly, you’d think so. Those of us who’ve long understood the connection between moving and learning have been waiting just as long for the educational “revolution.” And yet, not only is movement in the classroom a rarity; physical education and recess are being eliminated as though they were completely irrelevant to children’s growth and development. Perhaps the revolution will only arrive when you, as a parent, become aware of movement’s role in learning and begin to insist the schools do what’s right for children and not merely what the policy makers think they should be doing.

Thanks to advances in brain research, we now know that, because a child’s earliest learning is based on motor development, so too is much of the knowledge that follows. The cerebellum, the part of the brain previously associated with motor control only, is now known to be quite involved with cognitive activity. Study after study has demonstrated a connection between the cerebellum and such cognitive functions as memory, spatial orientation, attention, language, and decision making, among others.

Brain research has also informed us that most of the brain is activated during physical activity – much more so than when doing seatwork. In fact, sitting for more than 10 minutes at a stretch increases fatigue and reduces concentration.
Movement, on the other hand, increases blood vessels that allow for the delivery of oxygen, water, and glucose (“brain food”) to the brain. And this can’t help but optimize the brain’s performance!

All of this, of course, contradicts the longstanding and much-loved belief that children learn best when they’re sitting still and listening and working quietly at their desks. It also helps us understand why

• one Canadian study showed academic scores went up when a third of the school day was devoted to physical education.
  
• a Canadian study demonstrated children participating in five hours of vigorous physical activity a week had stronger academic performance in math, English, natural sciences, and French than did children with only two hours of physical activity per week.
  
• a study of third-grade children participating in dance activities improved their reading skills by 13 percent over six months, while their peers, who were sedentary, showed a decrease of two percent.
  
• in France, children who spent eight hours a week in physical education demonstrated better academic performance, greater independence, and more maturity than students with only 40 minutes of PE a week.
  
• children who participate in daily physical education have been shown to perform better academically and to have a better attitude toward school.
  
• a study conducted by neurophysiologist Carla Hannaford determined that children who spent an extra hour a day exercising did better on exams than students who didn’t exercise.
  

It is a huge mistake to think the mind and body are separate entities. The truth is that the domains of child development – physical, social/emotional, and cognitive – simply do not mature separately from one another. There’s an overlap and interrelatedness among them. And children don’t differentiate among thinking, feeling, and moving. Thus, when a child learns something related to one domain, it impacts the others.

As it happens, movement is the young child’s preferred mode of learning – because they best understand concepts when they’re physically experienced. For example, children need to get into high and low, small and large, wide and narrow shapes to truly understand these quantitative concepts. They need to act out simple computation problems (demonstrating the nursery rhyme “Three Little Monkeys” to discover three minus one equals two) to comprehend subtraction. They have to take on the straight and curving lines of the letters of the alphabet to fully grasp the way in which the letters should be printed.

Eric Jensen, an authority on brain-based education, labels this kind of hands-on learning implicit – like learning to ride a bike. At the opposite end of the spectrum is explicit learning – like being told the capital of Peru. He asks, if you hadn’t ridden a bike in five years, would you still be able to do it? And if you hadn’t heard the capital of Peru for five years, would you still remember what it was? Extrinsic learning may be quicker than learning through exploration and discovery, but the latter has greater meaning for children and stays with them longer.

There are plenty of reasons for this, but one of them may be that intrinsic learning uses more senses, and the more senses used in the learning process, the more information is retained. Intrinsic learning also creates more neural networks in the brain. And – important to the child – it’s more fun!

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Rae Pica is a children’s physical activity specialist and the author of 14 books, including her latest release: A Running Start: How Play, Physical Activity, and Free Time Create a Successful Child (Marlowe & Co., 2006) and Great Games for Young Children (Gryphon House, 2006). . She has shared her expertise with such clients as the Sesame Street Research Department, the Centers for Disease Control, Gymboree Play & Music, and the President’s Council on Physical Fitness & Sports. You can visit Rae at www.movingandlearning.com.