Moving and Grooving Activities: Nouns

I’m continuing my Moving and Grooving Series by working on teaching nouns. I hope you enjoyed my Verbs post!

This week it’s all about nouns, and these fun activities will get those little feet (and yours) moving!

Activities:

1. Jump on the Noun Words!

Have students squat down on the floor and prepare list of words in front on you. Read off words and have students jump up every time they hear a noun. If a student jumps on a non-noun (say that 5 times fast), explain why it is not a noun.  This is great exercise! Not joking-we were literally out of breath!

You can continue this game using common and proper nouns. Have students only jump up when you read off a proper noun.

To create a challenge, switch your role out and have a student to be the “noun reader.” They will need to determine whether the other students (and you!) are jumping on the correct words.

2. Noun Islands

Place a group of mats (or in my case), circles on the floor. Make one area a “place” area, one a “thing” area, one a “person” area, and one an “idea” area. Name off nouns and students move to the corresponding area or “island” to identify nouns.  Switch students out to name off nouns and decide whether students are moving to the correct islands.

(Please ignore my dirty floor!)

3. Noun Sentence Hopscotch

Place rows of nouns on the floor. Make one column people nouns, one column thing nouns and one column place nouns. Students must jump on noun cards to form a sentence that contains a person, thing and place noun.

I hope you are going away with some fun ideas on teaching nouns with movement! Check back soon for more topics!

There’s a lot of research out there that supports movement for learning. They are inter-related. Need some proof? According to researcher Terrence Dwyer, exercise supports success in school. His research found that exercise improves classroom behavior and academic performance (Dwyer, Sallis, Blizzard, Lazarus, & Dean, 2001) and that even when an experimental group got four times more exercise per week than a control group of their peers (375 minutes versus 90 minutes), their “loss” in studying time did not translate into lower academic scores (Dwyer, Blizzard, & Dean, 1996). His research further revealed that social skills improved in the groups who exercised more. Other research (Donevan & Andrew, 1986) has found that students who are engaged in daily physical education programs consistently show not just superior motor fitness, but better academic performance and a better attitude toward school than their students who do not participate in daily P.E.

Wow. That’s a lot of support for movement!

And…as if that’s not enough, after reading this article and this one and this one, I’ll sure you’ll want to start incorporating movement into your therapy as well! No worksheets, no sitting, no staring into space (although NONE of our kids ever do this, right?). We’re moving out from our little table and getting down with some movement!