Rockfish River kids learn through motion, activity

Bryson Rittenhouse tossed a neon green scarf into the air, followed seconds late by a hot pink scarf from his other hand. As the scarves floated down he snatched them from the air, making a point to reach across his body to catch them.

“It’s criss-cross applesauce,” said Rittenhouse, a first grader at Rockfish River Elementary School.

Around him other first graders from Patti Moon’s class balanced on ladders, walked letters on a specially designed mat, spun on scooters, and “alligator crawled” and log-rolled across mats.

Others traced shapes taped to the gym’s wall with their dominant and non-dominant hands. Every two minutes the music would change telling the students it was time to rotate to the next of the seven stations.

These stations and activities are part of “Action Based Learning,” an initiative that says students learn better through motion and being active. Students gradually progress through the different levels of the station, with the class advancing as a group. Rockfish implemented this program about two months ago in all of its pre-K through second grade classes.

“They’re having so much fun doing it, they don’t know they’re learning,” said Nita Hughes, the principal of Rockfish.

Rittenhouse agreed the activities were a lot of fun, especially the scarf station, his favorite.

Action Based Learning activities focus on bilateral movement and muscle memory. The spinning exercises also improve brain function, said Diane Coleman, the physical education teacher at Rockfish and the person who introduced the program to the school.

At the ladder station, students practice balancing as they pass color coded rungs. Before advancing to the next rung they either read a word or say the color of the rung, depending on the exercise. At the mat station, they look at a poster with a diagram of how to write letters and then replicate it by walking the outline of the letter on a special mat.

Coleman said she had seen workshops on the program at conferences and decided it would be a good program to try, especially with students who were not meeting their grade-level goals for reading and math.

“The research is there that this is how kids learn,” Coleman said.

A California study of 954,000 students showed that the higher academic achievement was associated with higher levels of fitness, according to the Action Based Learning lab manual.

Over the summer, Coleman met with Hughes to discuss the program and together they began looking for grant money to purchase materials like CDs, the letter mat and the special ladders.

The program is paid for with money from the special education and early learning program and a grant of more than $1,000 from the Nelson County Education Foundation.

Coleman also visited schools in Prince Edward County, in northern Virginia, to see how the program was implemented. This is the only other county to use Action Based Learning in Virginia, Coleman said.

The students meet in the gym five times every four weeks for about 40 minutes per session. Eventually, Hughes hopes to have the students, especially the kindergarteners, go more often, maybe once a day like in Prince Edward County.

Coleman and Hughes also hope to have the program expand beyond the gymnasium to exercises in the classroom too. The incorporation of Action Based Learning has already begun, primarily within the kindergarten and first grade classes.

An empty classroom has been transformed into a room where students can be taken for extra help in class, including special education students. Within this classroom, teachers are able to use the Action Based Learning methods to improve the students’ learning.

Coleman has taken certain students aside who are struggling and worked with them using the new methods. She has helped about eight students learn to write their names by progressing them from tracing the letters to hopping through hula hoops spelling their names as they went.

She has also taken a particular interest in the five kindergarteners who received the lowest Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening scores in the fall. In addition to the regular help the students received, Coleman has worked with them for 20 minutes a day using Action Based Learning activities.

All of the kindergartner’s scores have increased by 50 to 60 percent since the first test was taken, Hughes said.

Moon said she considers the Action Based Learning program and Coleman herself to be valuable tools for her first grade class.

“She’s given me several more instruments,” Moon said. “It’s a big resource for teachers if we have little ones that are struggling.”

Moon and other teachers have assisted Coleman by hanging up posters around the school on subjects the students are learning so that the visuals can reinforce what they are learning in the classroom and gym.

In addition to Coleman’s tutoring and advice, there are CDs teachers can use in their lessons, incorporating physical activities into the learning, such as holding up signs to answer questions posed in the song. Some of the classrooms have smaller versions of the letter mat hanging on the wall so students can engrain the images into their brains.

There is also a book in the library with suggested lesson plans for teachers to use Action Based Learning in their classrooms. Some plans in the book include using the Macarena to learn the multiplication tables or the chicken dance to learn long division.

Rockfish’s teachers also heard a presentation from John Almarode, a brain researcher at James Madison University, on the benefits of movement while learning.

“One of his sayings is ‘When the bum is numb, the brain’s the same,’” said Hughes. “You can’t sit for too long. You need to be up and moving.”

This was something Almarode demonstrated with the Rockfish faculty, having them up and active during the presentation. He will be back in February to provide the second part of the presentation.

Hughes said the program is important for all of the students in the county, not just the Rockfish elementary school students.

“Overall, we’re looking to improve the graduation rate in the county and that starts in the elementary schools,” she said. “We’re looking for ways to motivate students to learn and this is a fun way.”