4 Hacks to Keep Your Students Physically and Mentally Active

We all know that physical activity is important to an overall healthy lifestyle and it contributes to success in multiple areas of life. But we, as a society, are becoming more and more aware of the importance of mental health and mental activity. Essentially, we need to exercise our brains and keep them active so that we grow in mental clarity, intelligence, and astuteness.

As an educator, it’s important to maintain physical activity and mental alertness yourself, but it’s also important to encourage your students to do the same and give them opportunities to grow in these areas of health. Here are four hacks to keep your students active and healthy, both physically and mentally.

Give Assignments Related to Both Types of Activity

It can be challenging to come up with unique activities that foster both physical and mental activity, especially if you teach a core subject like English or science. But get creative and your students will gain far more than a simple lesson from your assignments. Maybe math students can perform a physical activity and do calculations about their heart rate, calories burned, or distance traveled. Maybe English students can take a walk around a park and practice describing it the way some great writers of the past describe nature. Science students can do a genetics project where they test physical abilities of family members and then analyze the data. Encourage students to think outside the box when it comes to combining mental sharpness and physical activity, and they will grow in both areas, all the while learning basic educational lessons.

Allow Times of Rest

Rest is absolutely key to both physical and mental health, so be sure to encourage students to rest. This may mean a day or a week off from homework, an assignment that requires them to practice some form of meditation or breathing exercises, or requiring them to read a non-educational novel just for fun. Even if students are obliged to complete a “restful” task, they will still be refreshed from it and will experience benefits.

Get Up and Move During Class

Whether you’re doing a review for a test, teaching a new concept within a new unit, or assessing your students’ level of understanding on something they just learned, do whatever you can to get them up and moving during class. Not only will this help them retain the information you’re going over because it’s engaging more of their attentiveness, but it will also keep them moving. You don’t have to do physically competitive activities like races (though you can), but just getting them moving will help them stay awake, alert, and absorbing more information. If you have the opportunity to go outside, even if you’re just going out there to sit in the sunlight during a lesson, it will help mental clarity and focus, adding to the overall wellness and attitude of students.

Do Mental Exercises & Play Memory Games

It’s definitely easier to focus on keeping students physically active in certain classes and mentally active in others. One way to sharpen their mental agility without them even realizing it is to do mental exercises, play memory games, or complete puzzles of different varieties. Logic puzzles are fun for a lot of students, as are memory games like Mastermind. You can also show students a number of items for a set amount of time, have them close their eyes and take one away, and then ask them to name the missing item. Doing puzzles like Sudoku, word searches, and crossword puzzles will also keep them mentally active without being terribly boring for them.

No matter what subject you teach in school, physical and mental activity are important parts of every great learning environment, and it’s the responsibility of you as the teacher to encourage this form of exercise in your students.  Embrace these ideas and put them to the test—we’re sure you’ll see positive results in your students, such as increased focus, improved retention, and an improved thirst for knowledge.

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