Meet me in the Middle Chapter 4

The main topic in Meet Me in the Middle chapter 4 is active learning, and incorporation physical activity into your learning. Middle school students don’t really know how to stay still, and most of the time the only physical activity they get during the day is gym class, or in some schools, recess. But most of the time this isn’t enough and kids spend the rest of the day antsy and squirming in their seats. One way to help this problem is to incorporate some form of physical activity into your lesson, so that kids are getting up and moving around in the classroom, and still learning the lesson. This not only gets them up and moving, but most of the time middle schoolers have more fun moving around, so the lesson becomes more fun and engaging and they are more likely to learn the key points of the lesson.

Physical activity can be implemented into every subject, in the example provided by Rick Wormeli, he took students outside to measure and learn about ratios, using a tree and shadows, and he also mentions a physical activity to do with punctuation. And physical activity doesn’t necessarily mean just getting students up and running around, sometimes just taking them outside to do an activity, or getting them up and drawing on the board can get them stimulated in the lesson.

When kids are squirming and being forced to sit, they aren’t absorbing the lesson because they’re thinking about how they would rather be doing something else, so by getting them up and moving, and learning something, they’re much more likely to absorb the lesson.