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.
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.