Treadmills In Classroom Affecting Students’ Grades
Friday, June 18, 2010 at 14:12
A teacher from Saskatoon shared some astonishing results
yesterday with educators from northern Saskatchewan.
Allison Cameron of City Park Collegiate was the keynote speaker at the Northern Physical Activity Roundtable in Prince Albert.
The Grade 8 teacher was talking about the Movement Matters Program.
Launched a few years ago, the initiative saw her use treadmills and exercise bikes inside the classroom.
Although many kids were reluctant to get on the machines at first, she says all of them were using them and thriving in school by the end of the year.
She says, in the first year, testing revealed that some of her students increased their vocabulary skills by six grade levels in just four months — and everyone in the class improved by at least one grade level.
Cameron says she developed the program because of the decline of physical activity in schools.
She notes some of the decline of physical education programming coincides with a renewed focus on science and math in the classrooms.