In this book I endeavor to explain why we should use the whole, moving body in math learning by pulling from both research and practice to build a framework for meaningful, body-based math learning, but the short answer is that when children harness their innate body knowledge for mathematical sense making, they also harness their whole selves in the pursuit of new ideas and understanding. They develop, communicate, and reason about mathematical ideas both nonverbally and verbally. Teachers regularly report to me during the math-and-dance work I do with their students that they cannot believe how much the children are “talking math” while they endeavor to meet the physical and mathematical challenges presented to them and during other parts of the day. To me this makes perfect sense because this is how we learn the meaning of words in the first place—in context. Children can make good sense of the world when they get a chance to interact with it, and children are also well able to reason with and about things they observe and do. But they can do this only if they get the chance to do, make, investigate, converse, wonder, build, express, and reflect. Without these kinds of interactions they might still be able to memorize math facts, but memorization would not necessarily mean they would know, for themselves, that something was true.
In this book I focus on what it means and looks like to bring meaningful movement and math learning together in the classroom. It is completely understandable if you initially have reluctance, doubts, or questions about using movement in math class. This reluctance could be, in part, related to the fact that lots of us have really learned math only as it’s presented on the page or as a series of rules, facts, and procedures to memorize. Math learning using the whole body can feel and look very different than what we’re used to thinking of as math. But experiencing math this way can become a potent opportunity to create new insights about the math ideas not necessarily or immediately accessible to us as represented visually on the page. We want math to make sense to our students, and the moving body is a wonderful partner toward that goal. Of course, trying out any new approach for the first time may induce a little trepidation, but this book (and its online video companion) is filled with everything you need to get started: the whats, the whys, and the hows of helping learners make math meaningful through purposeful, whole-body-based math investigations and problem solving.
— Introduction, xvi-xvii
