Review: Moving with Words & Actions

Do you work with preschool or primary aged children?   If so, Shape America has come out with a really neat book for promoting physical literacy in children, from preschool through primary grades.  This book is called Moving with Words & Actions. 

Quick Book Synopsis:  
Moving With Words & Actions will help you develop physical literacy
and language literacy in your preschool and primary-grade students. The
text offers more than 70 lesson plans that are aligned with SHAPE
America’s National Standards and Grade-Level Outcomes for K-12 Physical
Education. The plans use an interdisciplinary approach and are adaptable
for various settings. 

Each lesson plan includes three learning tasks that help children apply a variety of action words and movement concepts to the moderate to vigorous intensity physical activities prescribed in the tasks. Most tasks are easy to implement, requiring no equipment or specialized setting.

The Book’s Purpose:
Moving With Words & Actions is geared toward helping a teacher equip their students with confidence in using their bodies well in a variety of environments. The students will be taught good action words as they learn to use their bodies better. 

Fun activities to help the children under your care learn actions and words. 

Set Up
The book is divided into two sections.

Section one to help you the teacher with
1. Selecting Age-Appropriate content
2. creating ad implementing lesson plans
3. making the most of every lesson
4. Assessing Children’s ability to move with words and action

Section two contains 70 lesson plans
5. Moving with Words & Actions to create healthy bodies
6. Moving with Words & Actions in our community
7. Moving with Words & Actions like living animals
8. Moving with Words & Actions in Science and Math
9. Moving with Words & Actions in Language Arts

I found the lessons to be thorough and working across disciplines, for instance “building structures” had children learning about arches, what they are, how they look, how to build one with their bodies of different heights and widths, and then how to move through them.  The lesson then closed with helping the children think about what they did.  What was easily or hard, how they moved through the arches…how they used their bodies to move through high arches or low ones. 

 
Moving with Words & Actions
Rhonda L. Clements
Sharon L. Schneider
Human Kinetics
Shape America
272 pages
Adult, teacher, resource, physical education

Reviewed for: Human Kinetics
 
Where can I find it?
Amazon.ca: Moving with Words & Action.
Amazon.com: Moving with Words & Action.