Movement and Math have a Connection that Speaks to Willson School Students’ Learning

By Steve Sucato

With partial funding by the Cavaliers Community Foundation, GroundWorks brought its Kinection for Learning program to Cleveland’s Willson School this past March – May. Home of the Tigers, Willson is a PreK-8 school whose mission is to offer a unique, individualized learning experience while striving to create meaningful connections within the community. 

Helping to fulfill that mission for the school’s students, GroundWorks’ Kinection for Learning program taught Rebecca Burcher, GroundWorks’ Education & Community Engagement Director (assisted by Alyssa George) and the company teaching artists Maddie Hanson, Nicole Hennington, Madison Pineda, Teagan Reed and Victoria Rumzis, addressed Kindergarten and 1st grade state standards in dance, physical education, social emotional learning, and math.  

For the Kindergarten students that meant exploring shapes such as squares, circles, triangles, rectangles, hexagons, cubes, cones, cylinders, and spheres. While the first-graders practiced “counting on”. Counting on is a strategy used in addition/subtraction where you start with the larger number and count on from there. For example, if you have 5+2, you start at 5 and count two more (5, 6, 7). 

The classes were held for Kindergarten students in two inclusive classrooms gathered in the school’s gym and the first-graders in two inclusive classrooms, one Deaf Education class and outdoors.

“I truly enjoyed my time teaching and working with the Willson students,” says Pineda. “It was so fun to teach them about two dimensional versus three dimensional shapes and how we can use objects, images, and even our own bodies to create them.”

In working with the students on movement related to mathematics, Pineda says she used a version of the classic game of Hopscotch as a means for students to practice addition and subtraction skills. For this, the teaching staff drew consecutively-numbered chalk squares that started with number one and ended with twelve. From there, “the kids were then able to take turns hopping, skipping, running and more to figure out math equations we gave them,” says Pineda. “It was super helpful for many of the students to physically add and subtract from a number by moving forward or backward. Students were even able to try again, sometimes with help from us, when equations got more difficult. Overall, it was inspiring to see the students enjoy doing math equations while using movement to keep themselves engaged.”

Fellow teaching artist Rumzis echoed Pineda’s sentiments, saying “Connecting the mind and body together offered the students a new way to look at a math problem. Encouraging the ‘muscle of creativity’ in students is an important tool to problem solving.” 

The program, designed to align with Ohio Academic Content Standards, also addressed other dance, physical education, and SEL state standards goals with the students.

GroundWorks began working with the Willson School in 2012, Continuing a relationship with Willson Physical Education teacher John Dorotics that had begun years earlier at Woodbury Elementary School in Shaker Heights.

For more information about GroundWorks’ Kinection for Learning program click here 

Photos of Willson School students engaged in Hopscotch-Math exercise. Photos by Teagan Reed.