The Importance of Motion

This Summer I read the book, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina. What a fantastic resource for educators! 
For years, I saw firsthand the benefits of an "out of your seat" approach to learning. Brain Rules provided the scientific evidence that supports my teaching style. Multi-sensory movement, music, and mnemonics filled lessons are great ways to engage students and are highly effective in transferring content into student long term memory. 

What really stuck out the most was how important movement is. Motion is essential!  Not only does it signal to the brain that you are awake and ready to learn, movement increases oxygen and epinephrine flow to the brain, captures student focus, grows brain cells, and enhances cognitive processing.  If you see it, hear it, do it, and repeat-you will remember it. Most importantly,  it makes learning fun! 

In this blog post, I would like to share with you a resource that I added to my Teachers Pay Teachers Online Store, The Flying Pig. This Metric Units Math Mnemonic Resource is available for free and uses the King, Henry, Died, (Base), Drinking, Chocolate, Milk mnemonic to remember metric units of measurement.This mnemonic has been around as long as I can remember. My teachers first shared it with me in the early 1990s, or as my daughters would say, way back when pants were baggy and hair scrunchies ginormous.  I tweaked the mnemonic a bit and added the fun element-motion. 

King, Henry, Died-, helps students remember kilo-, hecto-, deca-, Base is a reminder that any metric unit (grams, liters, or meters) can be placed in this space to represent 1.  Drinking, Chocolate, Milk- is the reminder for deci-, centi-, mili-  metric units. To help students remember the difference between deca- and deci- we remember that a comes before i, so deca- is the first D in this mnemonic.

This is what the poster looks like that we use in class and in our interactive notebooks. 

Available for Free on The Flying Pig Teachers Pay Teachers Store!

I also created a Youtube video to show this mnemonic in action. It is simple but effective.   

 I hope this post proves helpful to both teachers and students. By adding just a touch of "out of your seat" you can make all the difference for your students.  

Have Fun!-The Flying Pig