When Math Leaves the Desk: Movement, Meaning, and the Parts That Made Me Pause
Article: Riley, N., Lubans, D., Holmes, K., Hansen, V., Gore, J., & Morgan, P. (2017). Movement-based mathematics: Enjoyment and engagement without compromising learning through the EASY Minds program. EURASIA Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, 13(6), 1653–1673. https://doi.org/10.12973/eurasia.2017.00690a
Riley and colleagues’ EASY Minds study is, at its core, a very grounded promise: you can embed physical activity into primary math lessons and get more enjoyment and engagement without sacrificing the quality of learning. Students described the shift from worksheet-heavy routines to lessons where they were outside, moving, collaborating, collecting data, and then actually doing something with that data. Teachers didn’t frame it as cute exercise breaks, but as a different pedagogy: one that made math feel less like rinse and repeat and more like sense-making with your whole body.
And honestly, reading it alongside my thesis brain (households, early childhood centers, misrecognition, funds of knowledge), it didn’t land as just movement is good. It landed as: recognition changes everything. Below are two places in the paper that made me stop and ponder, and why they’re now living rent-free in my head.
Pause #1: “It makes you stop and think…” (and I did)
There’s a teacher line that’s deceptively simple: the benefit is it makes you re-evaluate what you’re doing… it makes you stop and think about how you’re teaching and whether there’s a different way. That sentence is doing more than “reflection is good.” It’s pointing to a shift in what the teacher thinks counts as math teaching. Because in EASY Minds, the math isn’t only the written answer at the end. It’s also:students generating data (not just consuming it), students explaining strategies to each other, students taking ownership of the activity design and flow. And this is where my thesis examples start elbowing their way into the room.
In my fieldwork, I keep seeing young children doing STEM-ish reasoning in the wild: estimating quantities while filling a half-mug for plants, sorting and counting items during household tasks, predicting outcomes (“if we pour like this, it spills”), troubleshooting tools/materials, and revising actions mid-task. That reasoning is often underlinable in the moment. But the institutional question is: does anyone call it learning?
EASY Minds is basically a case study in what happens when an institution does name embodied, social, practical work as “real math.” The teacher quote made me pause because it’s the institutional version of what I’m trying to argue in my thesis: recognition isn’t a compliment. It’s a mechanism. When a practice is recognized, it becomes teachable, buildable, and extensible. So, my stop and ponder wasn’t just pedagogical admiration. It was a sharper question: If teachers can “stop and think” because movement changes what’s visible as learning… what would it look like for Anganwadis to “stop and think” about the STEM already happening in households?
Pause #2: The “rinse and repeat” line felt… too familiar
A student describes typical math class as “rinse and repeat,” and then spells out the vibe: worksheets, boredom, confusion, drifting off, and a system where not understanding becomes almost routine. This hit me because it’s not just a critique of worksheets. It’s a critique of a learning architecture where:movement is treated as distraction, talk is treated as misbehavior, social interaction is treated as “noise,” and the body is treated like an inconvenient attachment to the brain.
Then EASY Minds flips that. Students talk about being outside as “freedom to learn,” and describe how movement helped them focus and cut down on off-task distractions. But here’s the part that made me properly pause: students didn’t always have a neat causal explanation for why it helped. Some just knew it did. This is where my thesis lens gets a little stubborn.
In rural households, children often can’t give you a polished explanation of their reasoning either. They’ll just do the thing: adjust the water, re-sort, re-measure with their hands, compare sizes by eye, imitate and modify an adult technique. The cognition is there, but it’s distributed across action, tool, environment, and social prompting.
So the paper made me ask: What are we missing when we only trust learning that arrives as a verbal explanation or a written product? EASY Minds gives one answer: when you let students do math as an activity (not just a representation), you can get deeper understanding and engagement, and the learning doesn’t collapse.
And if I pull that back into my thesis context: the “rinse and repeat” complaint is also a warning for early childhood policy spaces. If Anganwadi learning becomes mostly about reciting, copying, or performing “school readiness” in narrow ways, then the system risks missing the child’s actual competence that shows up in routine life. The concrete bit I loved: math tasks that don’t pretend bodies don’t exist
The paper includes examples that are refreshingly practical, like:an empty number line drawn in chalk where each “jump” corresponds to a movement (squat, jump, lunge), turning subtraction into embodied place-value work, netball court math, where students identify shapes in the environment and measure real dimensions for scale drawings, target math, where throws generate scores that become mean/median/mode data.
These are “school” examples, but they rhyme with household learning: math that emerges from space, movement, tools, and purpose. And that rhyme matters for me, because my whole thesis argument is basically: household routines are not “pre-academic.” They are already forms of early STEM practice, even if the institution doesn’t have the vocabulary (or willingness) to notice.What I’m carrying forward (as both researcher and educator)
EASY Minds isn’t just saying “kids need to move.” It’s saying: Engagement and learning quality don’t have to be a trade-off. Pedagogy changes what becomes visible as competence.
Significance and connectedness aren’t decorations; they’re the difference between “school math” and “math that lives.”
And for my thesis, it sharpens a very specific takeaway: If an institution wants to leverage children’s funds of knowledge, it has to design learning environments where those funds can show up. Not as “examples” tacked onto a lesson, but as legitimate starting points for conceptual work.
Discussion question: What’s one math concept you teach (or learned) that could be redesigned as a movement-based task without turning it into a gimmick? What would students do, not just write?
Riley and colleagues’ EASY Minds study is, at its core, a very grounded promise: you can embed physical activity into primary math lessons and get more enjoyment and engagement without sacrificing the quality of learning. Students described the shift from worksheet-heavy routines to lessons where they were outside, moving, collaborating, collecting data, and then actually doing something with that data. Teachers didn’t frame it as cute exercise breaks, but as a different pedagogy: one that made math feel less like rinse and repeat and more like sense-making with your whole body.
And honestly, reading it alongside my thesis brain (households, early childhood centers, misrecognition, funds of knowledge), it didn’t land as just movement is good. It landed as: recognition changes everything. Below are two places in the paper that made me stop and ponder, and why they’re now living rent-free in my head.
Pause #1: “It makes you stop and think…” (and I did)
There’s a teacher line that’s deceptively simple: the benefit is it makes you re-evaluate what you’re doing… it makes you stop and think about how you’re teaching and whether there’s a different way. That sentence is doing more than “reflection is good.” It’s pointing to a shift in what the teacher thinks counts as math teaching. Because in EASY Minds, the math isn’t only the written answer at the end. It’s also:students generating data (not just consuming it), students explaining strategies to each other, students taking ownership of the activity design and flow. And this is where my thesis examples start elbowing their way into the room.
In my fieldwork, I keep seeing young children doing STEM-ish reasoning in the wild: estimating quantities while filling a half-mug for plants, sorting and counting items during household tasks, predicting outcomes (“if we pour like this, it spills”), troubleshooting tools/materials, and revising actions mid-task. That reasoning is often underlinable in the moment. But the institutional question is: does anyone call it learning?
EASY Minds is basically a case study in what happens when an institution does name embodied, social, practical work as “real math.” The teacher quote made me pause because it’s the institutional version of what I’m trying to argue in my thesis: recognition isn’t a compliment. It’s a mechanism. When a practice is recognized, it becomes teachable, buildable, and extensible. So, my stop and ponder wasn’t just pedagogical admiration. It was a sharper question: If teachers can “stop and think” because movement changes what’s visible as learning… what would it look like for Anganwadis to “stop and think” about the STEM already happening in households?
Pause #2: The “rinse and repeat” line felt… too familiar
A student describes typical math class as “rinse and repeat,” and then spells out the vibe: worksheets, boredom, confusion, drifting off, and a system where not understanding becomes almost routine. This hit me because it’s not just a critique of worksheets. It’s a critique of a learning architecture where:movement is treated as distraction, talk is treated as misbehavior, social interaction is treated as “noise,” and the body is treated like an inconvenient attachment to the brain.
Then EASY Minds flips that. Students talk about being outside as “freedom to learn,” and describe how movement helped them focus and cut down on off-task distractions. But here’s the part that made me properly pause: students didn’t always have a neat causal explanation for why it helped. Some just knew it did. This is where my thesis lens gets a little stubborn.
In rural households, children often can’t give you a polished explanation of their reasoning either. They’ll just do the thing: adjust the water, re-sort, re-measure with their hands, compare sizes by eye, imitate and modify an adult technique. The cognition is there, but it’s distributed across action, tool, environment, and social prompting.
So the paper made me ask: What are we missing when we only trust learning that arrives as a verbal explanation or a written product? EASY Minds gives one answer: when you let students do math as an activity (not just a representation), you can get deeper understanding and engagement, and the learning doesn’t collapse.
And if I pull that back into my thesis context: the “rinse and repeat” complaint is also a warning for early childhood policy spaces. If Anganwadi learning becomes mostly about reciting, copying, or performing “school readiness” in narrow ways, then the system risks missing the child’s actual competence that shows up in routine life. The concrete bit I loved: math tasks that don’t pretend bodies don’t exist
The paper includes examples that are refreshingly practical, like:an empty number line drawn in chalk where each “jump” corresponds to a movement (squat, jump, lunge), turning subtraction into embodied place-value work, netball court math, where students identify shapes in the environment and measure real dimensions for scale drawings, target math, where throws generate scores that become mean/median/mode data.
These are “school” examples, but they rhyme with household learning: math that emerges from space, movement, tools, and purpose. And that rhyme matters for me, because my whole thesis argument is basically: household routines are not “pre-academic.” They are already forms of early STEM practice, even if the institution doesn’t have the vocabulary (or willingness) to notice.What I’m carrying forward (as both researcher and educator)
EASY Minds isn’t just saying “kids need to move.” It’s saying: Engagement and learning quality don’t have to be a trade-off. Pedagogy changes what becomes visible as competence.
Significance and connectedness aren’t decorations; they’re the difference between “school math” and “math that lives.”
And for my thesis, it sharpens a very specific takeaway: If an institution wants to leverage children’s funds of knowledge, it has to design learning environments where those funds can show up. Not as “examples” tacked onto a lesson, but as legitimate starting points for conceptual work.
Discussion question: What’s one math concept you teach (or learned) that could be redesigned as a movement-based task without turning it into a gimmick? What would students do, not just write?
Thank you, Sushi. Your reflection really stayed with me—especially the line “recognition isn’t a compliment. It’s a mechanism.” I love that framing. It captures something fundamental that often gets missed in educational discussions: when educators decide to recognize a practice as learning, they aren’t simply being encouraging—they’re repositioning what counts as knowledge, what counts as skill, and what becomes possible within the classroom. Recognition becomes a shared anchor. Once we collectively name something as legitimate learning, we can build on it, extend it, and use it as a common direction for progress.
ReplyDeleteWhat resonated most was how EASY Minds makes visible the mathematical thinking that has always been happening, just not always acknowledged. That’s exactly the tension in your thesis: children are already doing STEM reasoning, but until institutions see it, it remains invisible, unleveraged, and undervalued.
Your discussion question made me think of a physics activity I used with my own students: measuring their power output in horsepower. Instead of sitting in a lab recording numbers from a device, they generated their own data—doing pushups, climbing stairs, running short bursts. Because they used their own bodies, the math wasn’t abstract. It was immediate, personal, and meaningful. They suddenly cared how the calculations worked because the numbers were about them.
That’s the power (no pun intended) of movement-based learning when it’s not a gimmick: it turns concepts into lived experiences. It invites students to do the idea—embody it—before they write it.
Thank you, Sushi, for the thoughtful reflection. As Lee said, I too liked the idea that “recognition is not a compliment but a mechanism.” This really resonated with my other experiences, whether as a student or now as a teacher
ReplyDeleteFor myself, as learning mathematics in my educational system largely conformed to the common principle of “rinse and repeat,” I soon grew familiar with procedures but not always with concepts from experiential or cognitive perspectives. The experiences I recall most vividly were those in which mathematics became physical, involving gestures or movements. Not only were these more interactive, but they were also more meaningful.
So, as a teacher, I tended to teach exactly the same way I learned to teach: with an emphasis on explanation, demonstration, and written practice. It felt natural because it was familiar. However, I now see the potential for teaching to quickly fall into such procedural traps that may inadvertently restrict how students experience learning mathematics. Indeed, this has motivated me to explore methods that involve movement, social aspects, and meaning, rather than seeing students as “recipients” of methods.
One concept I would revise using movement is linear functions, especially since we have had many experiences graphing. Creating a “human graph” where students physically map points, slopes, and intercepts onto a grid on the floor would help students visualize the overall shape and concept of a line. Moving along a slope, for example, “up 1, right 2,” would give students a sense of the concept of slope rather than just dealing with numbers. Moving into a new position would give students a sense of translating equations.