Kinesthetic Learning In The Literature Classroom Analysis

1496 Words3 Pages

Because Russian students often respond in a positive manner to kinesthetic learning, a strategy for teaching the complex topic of poetic meter is to engage students kinesthetically. “Moving Poems: Kinesthetic Learning in the Literature Classroom” explains this strategy in detail by stating how students were able to understand how meter worked by acting out the stressed and unstressed syllables with movement instead of simply clapping it, a commonly used yet confusing method that often yields mixed results (Zimmerman). This kind of movement allows students to feel the beat of the poem through their bodies not just to read it. The tactic begins with assessing how much physical movement is comfortable to the students in the classroom by having …show more content…

This strategy, which is essentially an acting exercise, asks students to recall characteristics of various literary pieces, so it aids recall of material. Conversely, it could also help to build prediction skills by having students relate existing schemata with a new character, which could make the strategy a precursor to a piece of literature by helping the students relate to various characters in the literature covered in class. Within my own classroom, I could use this exercise to introduce The Great Gatsby by having students act out how the believe “a character who is newly wealthy and trying to impress a woman would act” or “how a character who is a poor mechanic who finds out his beloved wife would act.” In this way, I could introduce the many cast of characters within the novel. Then, later on throughout the novel, I could use this as exercise to assess how well my Russian CLD and ELL students were grasping the characters’ motivations, backstories, and attitudes. For instance, I could ask them “how would Jay Gatsby walk when Daisy comes over” or “how would Daisy Bucannon walk when she finds out Jay had been shot.” In these ways, I could use this strategy as an assessment, the introductory tract to assess how well I was verbalizing what I wanted my students to do or how well my students were able to understand the verbal cue and put it in action. The second way in which I could use “walking this way” as assessment would be to judge how well students were engaged in the plot of the story and how they are able recall various characters and personify the attitude of the character. The goal of this acting exercise is to have students hypothetically “walk in the shoes” of the literary characters as a method of once again, physically

Open Document