By the end of this past summer I felt about as fit and in shape as I ever have. After having spent most days on the road, cycling over 1500 km and making nearly twenty short films, through the course of my Green Riders project, I was in a totally different physical state from when I left home in June. And not only physical of course. I was also in a very different mental state.

In many ways I felt calmer, clearer and more purposeful in my thinking than I have for years. Not only that, I’d lost some weight, my skin was clear and I was feeling more socially confident and engaged. So… What made the difference?

I think there were three big ingredients:

Physical exercise, being outdoors and daily acts of creativity.           Sweat, sun and imagination.

Get Moving!

In my day to day I rarely make enough time for physical exercise. In fact, when my class were diarizing our exercise last year, and adding up the minutes, I had to include my ten minutes walking to and from the nearby train station, because without them it was really quite pathetic. There is no doubt that this need is the same for my students.

Second graders stretching out in a weekly yoga session.

Despite having heard for years about the numerous benefits of regular in-class exercise, even in minute-long little bursts, I’ve rarely prioritized it in my timetable. I’ve supported a wide range of exercises in class, from yoga sessions to Brain Gym, from stretching to running laps of the playground, but none of it with enough regularity to demonstrate its priority. I’ve often had understandings with certain students that when they need to get up and take a walk, that’s exactly what they should do. When they need to hit the playground running, they should listen to their bodies. But the balancing of class time has never reflected exercise as being as important as I truly believe it to be.

A new feature in my second grade classroom. Click to download!

This year I found a fun Brain Break poster on my friend Sonya terBorg’s blog, and students have gotten into rolling the dice every day or two to structure our need to move around. It’s not bad, but I still feel I need to open up and encourage its regular use. If a summer of activity is so incredibly beneficial to me, and a few moments of it are so valuable to my students, I owe it to them to prioritize it as a regular part of our school life.

Get Out!

I’ve always been an advocate of being outdoors. I know I’m happiest with the sky above me and can only imagine that it’s an experience of equal value to my class.

An unlikely danger of joining the YIS Camping Club.

I’ve consistently involved myself in outdoor education pursuits, like our YIS Camping Club, but these are the big outdoor events. Despite preaching the value of any-excuse-to-get-outdoors in the curriculum, even for a few minutes, my class really do stay in our room much more than I think is best. There are so many things that work just as well or better in the sunshine as they do between our walls.

Perhaps I need to start looking at my daily schedule more through that lens… What would work just as well or better even a few steps away from the classroom?

A second grader relaxes on an inquiry outing in the park.

On another level, beyond the benefits of some vitamin D, we know that to connect to our environment we need to explore it. So as an educator with a clear personal environmental drive, the responsibility is mine to create opportunities for it to happen.

Use your imagination…

This past summer, at the end of nearly every epic day of cycling, I would knuckle down and work at editing the seemingly endless footage we were producing. At first, the obstacle of working with new tools, mostly Adobe Premiere Pro, meant the creativity was served in equal doses with tech problem-solving. But as the summer wore on, and I became more fluent with the tools, it was amazing to transition from the physical exertion of cycling all day, to the creative exploration of the evening. It stimulated a whole other part of me and gave me a tremendous sense of following a guiding thread, as well as the excitement of regular creative expression.

Creativity in construction.

At YIS we send our students out of the class for Visual Art, Drama and Music. This sometimes makes it feel like the homeroom time is for work and the out of class time for art. I know this is a narrow definition and there are unlimited creative opportunities in all aspects of curriculum, but I think, like in the subjects above, it’s something that I need to adopt as a clear part of my scheduling lens. If students don’t have ample time for creative exploration and expression each day, I worry that their creativity isn’t only being restricted… I imagine that over time it’s likely being stifled as well.

An “imagination number system”. Creativity constructs meaning in Math.

So… Following up on my earlier post Making Time for Doing It, I now have several more elements to add to the must do list of a quality school day…

The Essential Ingredients of a Quality Day of Learning:

• Ample time for hands-on, minds-on, hearts-on and senses-on doing
• Structures and flexibility for regular physical exercise
• Opportunities to take the learning out of the classroom
• Meaningful time for creative expression and open imagination

Look for this list to keep growing in a future post. In the meantime, I’d love to hear, what would you add?