Learning Through Movement and Music: Exercise Your Smarts

Kids love to move—and it’s proven that children learn academic concepts better when those concepts are combined with music and movement. So Debby Mitchell created a book and DVD package that includes video clips that combine learning with music and movement. The DVD also includes reproducible assessments, lyrics, and posters that can be used in the classroom to facilitate learning.

Learning Through Movement and Music: Exercise Your Smarts gets upper-elementary and middle school students moving while teaching them about their bodies, health and fitness concepts, and assessment of their fitness abilities. The book and DVD include

• background information and song lyrics for each activity;

• video clips that introduce each of the 14 activities;

• lyrics to use as handouts;

• posters for many of the concepts that can be used in the classroom; and

• activity assessments (including questions and answers, flow charts, word searches, and crossword puzzles) and teacher answer keys.

The DVD contains posters that reinforce the health and fitness concepts as well as the song lyrics and assessments, which you can reproduce. You can distribute the song lyrics to your students, helping them to learn the concepts. The activities are a great blend of movement and academic concepts and are suited for use in both PE classes and regular classrooms.

The activities themselves cover warming up, stretching, muscle identification and workouts, cardio and interval training, fitness testing, the FITT principle, and cooling down.

Learning Through Movement and Music enlightens students on the benefits, guidelines, and reasons for exercise and fitness in the environment in which they most love to learn: one where they are moving and having fun!

Debby Mitchell, EdD, has over 35 years of experience in physical education, coaching, fitness, and health. Mitchell is recently retired as an associate professor at the University of Central Florida, where her research interests included brain research, developmentally appropriate movement activities and music, dance and rhythms, children's wellness, obesity, and integrating technology into the curriculum.

She founded a company called GeoMotion Group to encourage people from all walks of life to get and remain fit. Mitchell works with schools that want to improve learning and increase physical activity. Her programs are in over 15,000 schools, and she has trained more than 800 preservice teachers and 3,000 educators at conferences in addition to writing books and delivering keynotes. In her leisure time, she enjoys being active herself through dancing, Spinning, and playing tennis.