Math on the Move

[desertflower]

Hello,

 

Has anyone ever used the book titled "Math on the Move: Engaging Students in Whole Body Learning"? 

 

Any pros or cons? 

 

Thanks. 

[PeterPan]

Lesson Plans - MALKE ROSENFELD Did you see these lesson plans? Might give you more of a sense of it.

 

My ds has SLD math and a lot of motion, so I was curious to look at it. When he was younger we used whole body activities for learning letters and sounds, etc., so in general it can be an engaging strategy for him. The things I'm noticing here are that it's collaborative, based on problem-solving, open-ended, and hitting a lot of supplemental topics. Some of it could be really good, like the activity with the tape ladder and determining the middle. 

 

To me the challenge would be behavioral control and that it's stuff that we *could* do just as easily at this point with a whteboard and a playmobil figure. And there's the question of whether you'd do it every day or as supplemental explorations once a week. You'd have set-up time and that once into it you'd have new set-up for the next lesson if he whizzed through the first.

 

Fwiw, Ronit Bird engages my ds and addresses his deep SLD math confusions without requiring me to tape up my floor and lose behavioral control. 

 

Now I'm confused. Are you looking at the Math on the Move store on TPT? That just looks like a bunch of worksheets. I was assuming you meant The Rosenfeld book. That's pretty tacky for TPT to be using the same name. It looks like the Rosenfeld book is 2016. Can't tell how long the TPT store has been there, but they have 154 items that seem to have nothing to do with movement. That's an unfortunate overlap. :(

 

My ds takes an art therapy social skills class, and what's interesting is they hit the same skills as other social thinking classes, but they hit them in a slower, more comfortable, more thoughtful way. A lot of traditional therapy (and intervention) is just boom, boom, boom. So when you bring in a dance teacher (Rosenfeld) to work on math, I think you're probably slowing down the pace, increasing the thought. It can be a nice change of pace. You could do the same activities with a whiteboard and toothpicks, whiteboard and figures. I have some cute people math counters that have long legs and arms that would work like the kids I'm seeing in these pics. You could do the math at varying levels of abstraction. In motion yourself would be the most concrete, then with a people counter on whiteboard, then with toothpicks, then with drawn lines on the whiteboard... 

 

For my ds, I'm always looking to do things multiple ways, in multiple contexts. It helps him generalize. I don't think MotM is set up to address his math SLD, but it's still an interesting tool. It probably has a lot of potential to be used multiple ways. (I haven't used it, just saying what I see.) If I found it on the cheap, I'd snap it up to have as a tool in my arsenal. Similar thought processes would be anything by Marilyn Burns, especially the Math By All Means series, books by Peggy Kay like Games for Math (which is AWESOME btw), and the GEMS units by Lawrence University.

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Edited February 18, 2018 by PeterPan

[desertflower]

Thank you. Yes i was talking about the one from Malke Rosenfeld.

 

I was interested in a fun way to teach math.

 

I have not seen the lesson plans, so thanks for the link.