A Movement-Based Thematic and Differentiated Learning Approach to get to the Hundredths Place (Place Value — Grade 2)
Personalized learning has been explored frequently. Being learner-centric is at the crux of designing a lesson that helps knowledge transfer to real-world scenarios. The following article describes a learning experience with the use of movement in a thematic and differentiated instruction to understand the hundredths place (place value).
Personalized learning has been a significant area of research in recent years and gained a constant impetus. Being learner-centric is the crux of designing a lesson that helps the knowledge transfer to real-world scenarios. In place value learning and teaching, reaching the hundredths place may be harder to reach than expected. An educator may need a sound understanding of how learners take in information and process it.
Using Movement in a Thematic Context
In my experience, the use of movement in a thematic context settled the concept of place value for life-long application to the real world. The methodology I finally settled with was a combination of traditional educational philosophies, and a multitude of techniques based on modern research evidence. The use of movement feeds to the bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. Carving a lesson using movement requires a fair understanding of proprioception and kinesthesia, information processing in the haptic system, spatial awareness, and hands-on skill mastery.
Movement in learning is not new in the educational space. Educators have successfully experimented with several strategies targeted at the mind-body connection, differentiated instruction with storytelling, use of language, constructivism, and multimodal learning. Interestingly, I discovered that learners with a dominant kinesthetic style, or those who enjoy hands-on learning better than other forms of instruction required differentiated instruction in some of the lessons, at the very least.
I explored how I could differentiate instruction by using movement to get to the hundredths place. My starting point was Charlotte Mason and Rudolf Steiner, as I followed their philosophies all through my homeschooling. I dressed their core thinking on pedagogy with the latest evidence on educational research, and I conceptualized my own story with my learner. We incorporated the elements of entrepreneurship, or making and doing from the Steiner approach, and settled for a nature-inspired storyline — the Charlotte Mason approach to tell the story.
The Story of Place Value
We started with a single bead in the wilderness, looking for friends to understand how numbers grew. There were several interesting discoveries during the learning process. First, the difficulty with getting from tenths to hundredths, was tied to relating magnitude and position. The use of whole-body and movement, tied to the theme, and progressing in the form of a story, from the units, to the tenths, to the hundreds, was all that was needed to form this link between magnitude and position.
Scientific perspectives explain that this thematic and differentiated instruction is purposeful and meaningful. Incorporating movement helped to interiorize the concept. Engaging the learner from conceptualization to enactment of the story promotes attention to every detail and retains motivation throughout the lesson. In a feasibility analysis of the pedagogical approach, the current methodology was found to be valid on comparing benchmarks to the approach followed in the lesson.
In essence, a child-led learning approach of this sort is an advantage for the educator and the learner. It promotes holistic learning experiences and maybe the ideal approach for complex mathematical concepts. In the future, it may be a good idea to understand fully where movement-based thematic and differentiated instruction works best, to predict higher chances of academic success.
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