Tony Lazar

Most people accept the idea that if you take some exercise, especially aerobic type of exercise, that you can change your state of mind so that you get a heightened sense of well-being

But that fact is that all motion creates emotion, all movement creates emotion and the focus of this article is to highlight this point and its relevance to children’s education.

Movement is such an important thing, especially for children, and we all know that children are continually in motion, they are always moving around, they are always doing things. Moving is their natural state of being and they are at their happiest when able to move.

However, when at school they are expected to sit at their tables for most of the time and learn. The logistics of teaching in a formal setting means they if they were moving around all the time it would be total chaos.

But what about in the home?

The expectation is that children will sit down quietly and get on with learning just as if they were in school. It is really important to realise this expectation is one of the greatest barriers to children doing work at home and leads to a lack of motivation.

However, the parent at home has a great advantage over the formal setting of the school and that is that children can be encouraged to move about and do things that they can’t do at school.

If movement can be introduced to academic work in the home then the motivation to do the work and to do it for longer periods will be high thereby increasing the rate of learning.

Children at home do not have to be sitting at a table writing and The Learning Well ™ and TimesTablesMaths.com have developed a number of systems that use movement as one of the keys to learning and tapping into the increased motivation that this brings.

The systems can be used for maths, literacy, writing, speaking and absorbing facts of all sorts.

One such system is the memory map. Children can do a memory map on the wall or produce it on a chart and just by doing so they have a freedom and an ease which gets them working at peak performance.

We encourage you to have some sort of board or easel up on a wall somewhere and to have plenty of pens available for drawing memory maps. Children love working in this way.

The map uses speaking and movement as the key to their learning. Testing how much children have learned about a subject, place or thing, anything really can be readily gleaned by you enabling you, the parent to interact and provide feedback to your children.

The great thing about speaking it is that it doesn’t have to happen whilst sitting in a chair. Children can be walking up and down the room, moving their arms about, play acting, anything that gets them absorbed in using movement and the memory mapping technique to learn. So, the whole process becomes more like play and as children like to play and have fun their motivation is raised.

To learn more on movement creating emotion and for how to create a brilliant learning environment and experience in the home and outside please do visit our Web Sites at The Learning Well.com and TimesTablesMaths.com.