Teaching Children with Communication Disorders on the Benefits of Exercise

Taylor Mills & Erica Nurenberg

Central Michigan University

July 26, 2018

Needs Assessment

The members of our audience are children ranging from seven to ten years of age. There

are nine children total in our group and some of the disabilities that they have include autism,

cognitive delay, articulation disorders, ADHD, lower cognitive level, decreased

proprioception, and hearing impairments. One of the children in our group has a

cochlear implant but prefers to use sign language. We plan to sign our names at the beginning of

the presentation to introduce ourselves and get her involved.

The children would be categorized as novice learners when it comes to the subject of

exercise. Some of the children have received physical therapy or are receiving it currently, so

those children may have a better understanding of exercise and why it is good for the body. It is

currently unknown which participants have had gym classes because this may be dependent on the

type of school they attend or if they are under a separate class schedule at their elementary school.

Some preferences that the children have for learning are using visual aids, doing hands-on

activities, and playing games. The SLP students in our group suggested using core boards to point

when we are moving onto the next activity by pointing at the word "Next." During our presentation,

the children will need us to keep directions simple, repeat words, and use gestures. We need to

continually check for their understanding and offer cues to get them back on track with the planned

activities. The children need us to use shorter sentences, recast with our vocabulary, and use

positive reinforcement whenever possible during our activity. Our group may have challenges

with transitions during activities, which we must accommodate for. The children's expectations at

this age are to stay entertained and have fun.

Learner Centered Objectives

 By the end of the thirty-minute session, the seven to ten-year-old children will be able to

name at least one reason why exercise is good for them and one way it affects the body with

minimal prompting from us, as the teachers. The seven to ten-year-old children will be able to

repeat demonstrated movements such as skipping, shuffling, jumping, bear crawling, and crab

walking independently with minimal verbal cues for the thirty-minute activity session. By the

end of the teaching session, the seven to ten-year-old children will at least put their thumb half-

way between up and down with minimal prompting when asked if they think they will be able to

have fun exercising at home to assess their perceived confidence levels.

Content

We plan to use an application type of content-process cycle during our activity session

because we want our young audience to a positive attitude on exercise and have fun with our

presentation. We plan to break up our content for our audience and have a ratio with more

activity than content. We are chunking our content into different portions, so we can use multiple

learning strategies to target the four learning styles. We will provide content through a hand

drawn concept map, through lecture and discussion, with a drawing activity,

and using group hands-on activities.

To grasp the content for this presentation, we investigated multiple sources on how to

educate children about exercise. To begin our presentation, we want to split the content into two

sections: how exercise helps your body and how it helps your brain. Taylor will discuss how

exercise can help your heart, lungs, bones, and muscles. We will discuss how the heart is a

strong muscle that pumps blood throughout the entire body.1 Exercise helps make bones stronger

and serves as places for muscles to attach. Muscles are strong and stretchy (have elastic

properties), which allow us to perform movement.2 Erica will discuss content on how exercise
helps our brains with thinking, sleep, mood, and memory. Exercise helps people improve their

test scores, improve memory, sleep better, concentrate, and keep from zoning out by improving

blood flow and oxygen distribution to the brain. It increases our energy levels and makes us feel

good, especially when we are stressed.2

We are going to demonstrate and involve hand movement activities by touching our head,

heart, making a bicep contraction, and feeling our lungs expand when describing content on each

body region. We are going to use a white board with hand drawn pictures of a brain, lungs, bone,

heart, muscle, sleep, and school as a visual prop to appeal to visual learners. We are also going to

hold up colorful sheets of paper that say "think," "sleep," "mood," and "energy". When

presenting this content, we want to incorporate multiple techniques involving as many senses as

we can such as seeing, hearing, and touching.

Then we plan to break up the content by performing a drawing activity where the

children can draw their favorite way to exercise or what exercise looks like to them. We will then

present more content by providing other examples of exercise to build onto their

prior knowledge, including swimming, running, walking, gym class activities, bike riding, push-

ups, dancing, playing in the sand or snow, kickball, and performing chores/yard work at home.3

We are then going to split into two small groups

and perform our physical activity "Follow the Leader Obstacle Course" outside in the play area.

Children ranging from six to eight-years-old are developing and sharpening with basic physical

skills, such as throwing, jumping, kicking, and catching.4 Children ranging from the ages of nine

to twelve-years-old are a step above this and they are working on coordination and improving the

above physical skills.4 We have to consider this while forming our exercise activity for the

children in our group ranging from the ages of seven to ten-years-old.

 Lastly, we want to meet as a large group and summarize the content of our

presentation. We want to have the children verbally complete our formal assessment to assess

what they have learned and then we can educate them on the importance of exercising at

least one hour per day based on guidelines set by the U.S. Department of Health and Human

Services because it helps with physical and mental development.5 This is very important for

young, developing children like our audience.

References:

1 Gavin ML. Why exercise is wise. KidsHealth from Nemours website.

https://kidshealth.org/en/kids/work-it-out.html?WT.ac=ctg#catfit. Published January 2018.

Accessed July 11, 2018.

2 Brennan D. How exercise benefits your whole body. WebMD website.

https://fit.webmd.com/kids/move/article/exercise-helps-body. Published January 2018. Accessed

July 11, 2018.

3 Lancaster General. Physical activity for your child: age 6, 7, & 8 years. Lancaster General.

http://www.lancastergeneralhealth.org/LGH/ECommerceSite/media/LGH-Media-

Library/Documents/Services/Service%20Lines/Healthy%20Weight%20Management/Fact%20Sh

eets/Physical-Activity-6-7-8-Years.pdf. No date. Accessed July 11, 2018.

4 Gavin ML. Fitness and your 6-to 12-year-old. KidsHealth from Nemours website.

https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/fitness-6-12.html#catfit. Published September 2014. Accessed

July 9, 2018.

5 US Department of Health and Human Services. 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for

Americans. Washington, DC: US Department of Health and Human Services; 2008.

Motivational Hooks

The three motivational hooks that would be appropriate for our audience of seven to ten-

year-old children include pictures on a prop, demonstrations using hand

signals/movements, and being overly enthusiastic about our topic. We are going to present

with a white board with hand-drawn pictures of areas where exercise benefits the

body including a heart, brain, lungs, muscles, and sleep. These are going to be bright, colorful

pictures that allow us to point to a visual while speaking, which may help the children practice

whole body listening and maintain their attention. The SLP students in our group stressed that we

encouraged this throughout our presentation because the children are very receptive to it. During

whole body listening, the children are using their ears to listen, their shoulders are turned facing

the speaker, their eyes are looking, and they are not speaking while someone else is. We are

going to also demo hand signals/movements during the beginning section of our content

presentation because our entire session encourages following directions, so the

children must mimic our motions, such as feeling their lungs inflate and expand with breathing.

This lets our audience practice following directions, concentrating, and communicating with

a group, which is especially important for our audience of children with communication

disorders. By being overly enthusiastic about our topic, we hope to transfer some of our energy

to the children on the topic of exercise because they look up to young adults as role models and

may be more open-minded to see how fun exercise can be.

Content Boosters

The five active learning strategies that would be appropriate for our seven to ten-year-old

audience are as follows: drawing a picture of themselves having fun exercising, creating a concept

map of how exercise affects different parts of the body and demonstrating it to the children, having
a newsprint gallery review of the pictures that they drew of themselves exercising so they can see

what their peers drew, having the kids perform a think-pair-share activity where they come up with

fun exercise activities they can perform at home and sharing one with the class, and having the

children participate in a "Follow the Leader" outdoor activity where we show them different ways

to move their bodies and teach them about which parts of their body they are exercising. These

active learning strategies are appropriate for our audience because, even with communication

disorders, all the children should be able to participate. These strategies are simple enough where

children ages seven to ten will be able to understand the information, and the strategies are also

age-appropriate because the children will have fun while learning about exercise.

Formative Assessment

We plan on utilizing several formative assessments throughout our teaching session in

order to confirm that the children understand the content that we provide them. After we are

finished presenting the first section of content to the children about the benefits of exercise, we

plan to ask the kids to name one reason why exercise is good for the body and one reason why

exercise is good for the brain. This will help us to gauge how well the kids are understanding and

retaining the information we are providing them and to make sure they are paying attention. At

the end of the session, we will ask the children how they felt about taking the information they

learned today and using it to have fun exercising at home by showing either a thumbs-up, thumbs-

down, or in between in attempts to meet our affective objective to assess their perceived

confidence levels. We also plan to use a "one sentence summary", which is

a classroom assessment technique (CAT), and we will quiz our group of kids on the questions

of who, what, when, where, and why in relation to exercise. These formative assessments are

appropriate for our audience because they are simple and will not take up a lot of time. They are
also providing opportunities to have the kids all participate at the same time, so everyone feels

included.

Summary

In hindsight, we wish that we were told about the young girl that did not want to participate

in exercise. If we would have known, we could have tried to find more of her interests and find

small things that could get her interested in an exercise of some kind. We could have incorporated

this into our outdoor, physical activity so she would have participated too.

We were able to successfully assess our learners at the end of our teaching session when

we met as a large group one last time. All of the children participated in performing the thumbs

up, down, or in-between when answering our question. During the verbal formal assessment using

the one sentence summary quiz, all of the children were able to answer at least one of the questions

and the group provided multiple answers to describe their perspective on exercise. We received

wonderful, helpful information from our SLP, Jennifer. She met with us a few days before our

presentation and offered further information about the group of children that we were going to

work with. She explained whole body listening to us and that we could use it to maintain our

group's attention. She suggested using small groups when we went outside to help keep the

children on task. She also told us about an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC)

device that one of the children uses to communicate, but she assured us that she understands

everything that we say. She needs the device to communicate verbally.

After the teaching session, our objectives were mostly met by the children. They were all

able to give one reason why exercise was good for the body and for the brain without

prompting; the majority of the kids raised their hands right away after the questions were asked

and some were even able to give multiple reasons as to why exercise was beneficial. The kids did
not require any prompting to do so. The majority of the children were also able to repeat the

demonstrated movements shown to them independently and with minimal verbal cueing. One

child did not like to exercise and would not participate in any of the activities even with

prompting. After the teaching session was complete, all but one child gave a thumbs-up when

asked if they would be able to take this information and find fun ways to exercise at home. The

child who gave a thumbs-down was the one that did not want to participate in any of the exercise

activities. The most difficult part of creating objectives for the children was coming up with the

degree of the behavior, such as the degree of verbal cueing we would allow the children to receive.

If we had to present again, we would like to come up with an acronym or a mnemonic to

incorporate into our presentation. This could help the children better chunk the information and

give them a fun phase or abbreviation that they could share with their friends and family

members. We also wish we could have spent more time on our outdoor activity so that we could

provide more content during the exercises we performed. We split the large group of nine children

into two smaller groups so that we could maintain their attention, but also so we could provide

more education on the topic of exercise.

The motivational hooks that we used during our teaching presentation included being

overly enthusiastic, hand-drawn pictures on a white board prop, and demonstrating with hand

signals/ movements. The white board with pictures was helpful to have as the teachers because we

could incorporate more movements by pointing to pictures and the children enjoyed the

bright images. We also incorporated a "follow the leader" theme into our presentation, which

worked well with our hand demonstrations and enthusiasm. The children participated well during

our follow the leader hand movements during the content portion and while exercising outside.

Next time we present, we would like to use technology to show a video or have a projector to put
up pictures while we teach the content portion at the beginning of the session. This was not a

necessity, but it would be a nice motivational hook because most children love technology.

The active learning strategies that we utilized in our teaching session were having the

children draw a picture of themselves having fun exercising and having them share it with the rest

of the children in a circle, creating a concept map of how exercise affects different parts of the

body and demonstrating it to the children, and having the children participate in a "Follow the

Leader" outdoor activity where we show them different ways to move their bodies and teach them

about which parts of their body they are exercising.

If we could do this teaching session again, we think it would be beneficial to have a more

interactive content section and having the children participate in a think-pair-share activity to get

them more involved. We also could have included a video to keep the kids engaged during the

content section. However, we were limited on time, and we think that the active learning strategies

we utilized with the children were successful. They enjoyed being creative with drawing pictures

and being able to share them with the rest of the children. This also allowed the rest of the group

to get more ideas of ways to have fun exercising. The concept map was also successful because

the kids were able to have visual aids when learning about how exercise is good for different parts

of the body. The "Follow the Leader" activity was also successful because the kids got to get up

and move, and we were able to show them that exercise can be fun by being creative.

The outcomes of our formative assessments were very positive and showed that the

children were paying attention and learned important information about exercise throughout the

teaching session. As previously mentioned, when asked to give one example of how exercise is

good for the body and one example of how exercise is good for the brain, each of the children was

able to give an example without being prompted. All of the children, except one, gave a thumbs-
up at the end of the teaching session when asked how they felt about taking the information they

had learned that day and using it to have fun exercising at home. When we asked the children the

who, what, when, where, and why questions about exercise, they were able to respond

appropriately. The children were able to state that exercise requires getting the body moving,

that anyone can exercise, anywhere, at any time, and that we need to exercise because it is good

for our bodies and our brains. We feel that we were successful in teaching the content to our

audience because we did receive such positive outcomes with our assessments, and we could tell

that the children enjoyed learning about exercise and performing the activities as well.