Chapter 4: MMM

This chapter can be summed up using one term, bodily-kinesthetic. The entire chapter is about helping students participate in active learning. As the name implies, active learning deals with movement and activity, which for middle school students is a necessity. At this age, the middle school student's body is changing rapidly and causing difficulties with some motor functions and sitting for long periods of time. Wormeli suggests that you get students moving about every 10 to 15 minutes so that oxygen can get into their brains, to stimulate learning, and to relieve pressure on the students’ aching joints. The other important thing to remember about middle school students is that they are very concrete thinkers, and have a hard time thinking abstractly. The chapter gives an example of a student who learned best when he did hands on work; so the teacher decided to take the class outside to measure and work with trees, the topic of the class. This little exercise greatly helped the student learn the material.
I thought that the chapter was interesting and gave some great ideas to get kids moving, but more importantly stressed the need to do so. Some of the things that stood out to me was to have the students stand up while talking about the materials just covered in class. I also liked the idea of having students get up to bring their papers to the teacher or making them put it in a basket on the other side of the room. My freshman year of high school, my history teacher had us do a lot of moving around. We also passed papers in a basket which required us to get up and move around a bit. I would be more than willing to try these approaches along with mixing in other ideas such as having students perform skits or re-enactments. On the other hand, I do think that you cannot really do this with every class because there are some classes were movement like this might distract them and prevent them from working. Taking a chance and having students be more bodily-kinesthetic is worth a shot, and I am willing to try anything that might help my students do better in school.