Kinesthetic Activities

In "kinesthetic" activities, students use their own bodies to act out the geometry of the physical situation they are studying. Most often, the whole class acts out the same physical situation and the teaching team can quickly identify and help the students who are struggling with the concept. In other instances, one or a few students act out a more complicated scenario. Prior to doing a kinesthetic activity, it is important that the teaching team establishes a classroom norm where students feel safe to be publicly wrong.

Benefits:

• Help students visualize geometric relationships and motion, particularly 3D systems that are hard to draw in 2D.
• Student participation gives an urgency to understand the central ideas.
• Instructors and other students can see how students respond to prompts.
• Instructors can easily respond & adjust to how students respond to prompts.
• Sometimes feel goofy & fun, can feel like “play.”
• Memorable.
• Wakes students up.
• Use of imagination is convenient context to talk about physical modeling and idealization.

Tips & Tricks:

• If the activity involves only a single student or a few students, take care in choosing students who will not be overly embarrassed by being singled out. We have had good success by asking for volunteers who are “feeling brave today.”
• If space is limited, you might ask for only a few volunteers who then demonstrate it for the rest of the class.
• For any activity that you're trying for the first time, it helps to tell the students: “This is the first time I've tried this activity--let's see how it goes!”