Focus Students With Movement & Music

Are you ready for your students to have an activity that leaves them calm and focused? Whether it’s a transition time between subjects or the beginning of the afternoon after lunch or recess, quick, engaging brain breaks and focus activities are essential. 

In all elementary grades, K-5, go beyond GoNoodle to provide new and effective music and movement strategies. Add culturally responsive teaching ideas and geography integration for something EXTRA special!

Here’s a music and movement routine in action at the beginning of a second-grade class.

Music, Movement, and Geography

Let’s combine music, movement, and geography into an effective new transition activity.

Create a Slide Presentation

Create a slide presentation that has different movement poses. Any yoga, stretching, or exercise pose will work.

1. You can find individual pose digital images on Amazon, TPT, Etsy, and Google Images. Search for kids, image, pose, yoga, Brain Gym, and stretching.

2. If you have room in your classroom, you can include poses that have students down on the floor. If you don’t have the room, keep to standing poses. 

3. Get input from your students! Let students create poses that use their chairs. Take pictures of ones that are effective and add them to your presentation. Student voice at its finest! 

4. Add the images to your presentation, one to a slide. You can manually move through the slides or set timing so that it is automatic and you are hands-free. This allows you to use proximity control and/or more eye contact with your students.

Digital Image Tip: If tree pose is on the right only, make a copy and flip the image in Canva. Now you’ll have right and left. In PowerPoint, you just drag the left (or right) side of the image in the opposite direction and it will reverse!

For integrating music and language arts (syllables), check out this Back-to-School 4 Corners name game!

Add Music

Add instrumental music to your slide presentation! The right music will enhance and support the flow from one pose to the next. 

1. Instrumental music is better for focusing because students aren’t listening to the lyrics of a song. However, if you find a song with lyrics, if it’s in a slower tempo or played at a quieter level, it can work too. 

2. You can find a wide variety of instrumental music on Spotify. Search terms might include genres such as “instrumental classical” or “instrumental jazz” or “instrumental Christmas”, etc.

3. You can also find great compilations from Putumayo. They create fabulous kid-friendly songs from around the world. The mp3s can be added directly to your Google or PowerPoint slide.

Tip: If students haven’t been exposed to music from around the world, they may react inappropriately. This is a great time to talk about differences, acceptance, and culture. What is wonderful about including a variety of music is that once exposed, most students become more accepting of sounds that are different, unusual, or unknown to them.

Why not integrate geography?

Integrate geography by choosing music from all around the world. Put a world map into your slide presentation with links to songs from all over the world. 

Your Spotify searches then would be “instrumental Greece” or “instrumental Zimbabwe.”

Bonus! Culturally Responsive Teaching & Family Involvement

Adding geography to this activity provides culturally responsive teaching opportunities.

As you come back from recess, ask a student, “Where do you want to go today?” Then they can choose the music. “Let’s go to Australia!” 

Take it a step further, ask students to suggest areas of the world or specific songs that they would like to include in their presentation. Make it a family assignment. 

Send a Google form to your students’ families with this info.

Families!

Every day we do *calming movements to instrumental music from around the world. We’ve moved to music from Japan, Ireland, and the US. Do you have any song suggestions for us? Please include the place of origin, name of the song, and a Spotify (or other) link to the music! We prefer instrumental music to help us focus. Tell us why you’ve chosen the song. 

*Something to consider: While I use some traditional Yoga movements, using “calming movements” is less restrictive in terminology.

Teaching the Routine

When you first introduce the activity, make it an absolute NO TALKING activity. Students at first may want to make sounds as they move to the different poses. 

Talk about it. 

Tell students that when something is hard to do, to start over without sound. So instead of groaning when your foot comes down out of a tree-like pose, put your foot down before you completely lose your balance, reset your foot, and try again.

This initial teaching will become a routine so you want to really work toward NO TALKING! Here’s more about teaching routines.

As this slide presentation becomes part of their routine, students will know that every day after recess (for example) they will be doing this activity. Using this type of music and movement activity will provide variety in your routines.

Body Shapes

If you’d like a pre-made presentation, here it is on TPT! 

The world map, body poses, and nine songs are already in Google Slides and PowerPoint formats. Also included is a Spotify playlist where I’ve included lots of additional sources of instrumental music from around the world.

Adding music and movement to your classroom will provide so much interest, engagement, and focus for your students while catering to different learning styles and promoting overall well-being!