Developing reading skills is a critical part of academic success and social development. It is also important to ensure that children have the necessary skills to perform at their level in their lives.
Now, a new study has found that the movement of a body part as an expression provides a better grip on letter learning. The study by a team of researchers from Copenhagen and Denmark states that children who move while learning about letters are more likely to improve their ability to identify individual letters.
The findings, which were presented in a journal titled Educational Psychology Review, were conducted by researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the National Reading Center of Denmark, who sought to find out whether whole-body learning instruction has a positive effect on a child’s learning ability, especially sound of letters.
Movement teaches children difficult letters twice as fast
The researchers noted that children who learned to form the sounds of letters were better able to learn these sounds than those who learned traditional methods. According to Linn Damsgaard, a Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen, the results of the study suggest that whole-body learning can help children develop their reading skills. The researchers further pointed out that there are difficult letters in Danish and that learning them quickly makes good readers.
The study was conducted on 149 children aged 5 to 6 years. They were divided into several groups based on their body type. One group used their entire body to form the letters, while the other two used their hands and arms to do the same. The control group learned to write letters using a traditional seated method.
The results of the study showed that children who learned the sounds of letters with hand movements while seated had a higher skill level than children who were taught in a traditional way.
Previously, the researchers found that children were more motivated by the classes in which they could move their hands and arms. Jacob Wienecke, an associate professor of education at the University of Copenhagen, said this type of teaching method could inspire school officials and teachers to prioritize exercise.
The researchers conducted the study to see if embodied learning can directly affect children’s ability to read individual words. Unfortunately, it was not possible to find a direct relationship between the learning methods and the reading ability of the children. This may be because the children were still in the early stages of their development and were not yet able to use their knowledge of letter sounds when reading.
