Meet Me in the Middle Chapter 4: Active Learning

Meet Me in the Middle Chapter 4: Active Learning
This chapter can be summed up using one term, bodily-kinesthetic. The entire chapter is about helping students participate in active learning. As the name implies, active learning deals with movement and activity; which for middle school students is a needed thing. At this age, the middle school body is changing quite rapidly and causing difficulties with some motor functions and sitting for long periods of time. Wormeli suggests that you get students moving about every 10 to 15 minutes so that oxygen can get into the brains, to stimulate learning, and to relieve pressure on the students’ aching joints. The other important thing to remember about middle school students is that they are very concrete thinkers who have a very difficult time thinking abstractly. The chapter gives an example of a student who learned best when he did hands on work; so the teacher decided to take the class outside to measure and work with trees, the topic of the class; this little exercise greatly helped the student learn the material.
I thought that the chapter was interesting and gave some great ideas to get kids moving. Some of the things that stood out to me was to have the students stand up while talking about the materials just covered in class; I also liked the idea of having students get up to bring their papers to the teacher or making them put it in a basket on the other side of the room. I would be more than willing to try these approaches along with mixing in other ideas such as having students perform skits or re-enactments. On the other hand, I do think that you cannot really do this with every class because there are some classes were movement like this might distract them and prevent them from working; I might just be thinking like one of those old school teachers, but I would be afraid that all this movement would prompt kids to have off topic discussions and cause them to lose their focus. At the end of the day it is worth a shot, and I am willing to try anything that might help my students do better in school.