Movement is Fundamental to How Children Learn

Scientific understanding of how the brain influences the body — and the body influences the brain — is shedding light on the role movement plays in learning and memory.

Incorporating movement has a significant impact on what students remember as compared to taking in concepts just auditorily or visually. That’s why at Cedarwood, we use movement as a teaching tool throughout the curriculum. Incorporating movement helps children with everything from learning their multiplication tables to understanding complex physics concepts!

Annie Murphy Paul details the significance of this in her book “The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain.”

Humans did not evolve to do their best work while siting down… Think about a child struggling to keep their body still during a lesson. ‘It takes a fair amount of mental bandwidth to keep our bodies still because we’re meant to be in a kind of state of constant motion. And to control your impulse to move — especially for children — uses up some of the mental resources that they could otherwise apply to their learning.’

Read more about how movement and gestures can improve student learning here.

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Why Waldorf? At Cedarwood, each student’s imagination is continually nurtured by a team of teachers and a broad spectrum of experiential learning opportunities as they develop their capacity for growth, creativity, and critical thinking. The curriculum is comprehensive and designed to educate the whole child, with lessons in math, science, language arts, history, geography, music, eurythmy, handwork, movement, and not one but two world languages, Spanish and Japanese. Art is not taught separately in our elementary program, but rather imbues students’ understanding of every single subject they encounter.

Curious about a Waldorf education for your child? Let’s connect!