Objective: Students will strengthen spatial reasoning and awareness through dance or movement activities. Spatial perception is a core skill to understanding relationships and patterns in math and science, but it is often given less focus in the classroom.

Teacher Takeaways: Simple dance or movement activities can help strengthen students' spatial reasoning by actually feeling spatial concepts with their bodies. This includes concepts like orientation, rotation and directionality. Incorporating movement into your classroom does not require formal dance skills, but just a focus on moving in different ways.

Class Activities: a) Follow-the-leader helps students coordinate and understand movements they see with movements they make themselves. It also practices sequencing and working memory skills. Start by modeling types of actions that involve spatial concepts, such as making angles with arms or legs, turning in a specific direction, moving on different planes, and moving across the room. b) A small group game like Twister helps students learn spatial relationships firsthand as they need to figure out how to manage their movements within a complex tangle of others'. c) Square dancing, sometimes incorporated into a gym class, is a more formalized group activity that exercises spatial coordination, directionality, balance, sequencing and movement in and around other moving peers.

OER Resource: Music & Dance (Digital Promise Learner Variability Project)