ROGERS — Students are getting their bodies into the act when it comes to learning at Eastside Elementary School.
“Walk like you are miserable,” Kenley Johnson said to her class of first-graders.
Twenty-two first grade faces tried to contort into varying degrees of sad, sprinkled with a few giggles. Can they walk in an elegant way? Girls lifted their hands in a princess wave or walked on tiptoe. Boys stood up straight and walked slowly around the room. Can they make a hideous face? The children grimaced. Some said their face looked ugly, others said they looked scary like a monster.
Acting out new vocabulary words brings meaning to what children learn, said Robin Wilkerson, principal at the school.
“That really seems to cement learning for the kids,” Wilkerson said.
The school is in its second year of a three-year program using Trike Theatre to bring motion into class. Eastside, which operates on a continuous learning calendar, has classes through June 12.
Trike Theatre teaches students how to learn, not teachers how to teach, said Rebecca Hahn, arts integration specialist with the group. Students learn to concentrate their thoughts and control their body movements to act out group pictures of what they are learning.
“It’s a really efficient way of teaching,” Hahn said. “The children are teaching each other.”
Definitions for perimeter and area, pulley and inclined plane were part of the action in Wes Faith’s fifth-grade classroom. Faith gave students a few minutes to discuss each concept before they built a tableau or frozen picture.
Asked to define how to test a mineral, classmates circled their arms and plopped imaginary acid on their imaginary rock. “Ding, ding, ding,” they sounded.
Fifth-grader Kayla Green fished out the “rock” and examined it. “Very interesting,” Kayla said.
The sound and movement made it their best skit of the morning, said David Rabelo, a fifth-grader.
“It’s funner than school, than sitting down,” David said.
Faith said he will sometimes ask his students to define a concept before he starts to teach it.
“If the students know it, there is no need for me to teach it,” Faith said.
Parent Jenny Harris said she will see her daughter thinking things out at home, making hand motions until she understands a concept.
“She’s more involved than just listening. She has to apply it,” Harris said.
Children learn to work together in their groups, said Angela Black, a parent.
“You have to talk and let your friends decide,” Black said.
The cooperation they learn is visible across the school, she said.
The program is partially funded through a grant from the Arkansas Arts Council. The school calls it an arts literacy program, principal Wilkerson said, but students are learning literacy skills in science, social studies and math as well.
Allowing students to think and express helps them to listen and to learn, she said.
“It’s not just reading. It’s not just writing. It’s the thinking,” Wilkerson said.