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. 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. The primary grade project students also showed a great improvement in test scores.