Walkabouts Are Intuitive for Teachers and Engaging and Fun for Students (Minnesota)

Profile

FIT Academy is a K-12 charter school in Apple Valley, MN. Serving close to 400 students, the school purposefully integrates Fitness and Health, Intellectual Development, and Teamwork and Characters into the educational experience of its students. 

Taylor Elasky teaches 2nd grade at FIT Academy in Apple Valley, MN. She has been teaching for seven years and has also taught kindergarten and 3rd grade.

“Walkabouts is a great tool to use as a spiral review at the end of the school year to loop back to the concepts that were taught at the beginning of the school year.”
– Taylor Elasky

Goals

An important part of the mission at FIT Academy is to incorporate movement into lessons and instructional activities. When the Walkabouts platform was introduced to the FIT elementary teachers at the beginning of the school year, Taylor Elasky thought it would be a great platform to use to integrate movement into the learning process without compromising instructional time.

Outcomes

Elasky focuses on Walkabouts ELA lessons in the beginning of the day and uses math lessons after lunch. She says the math lessons are “immediately engaging for that time of day,” as the students get settled back into the classroom. At the end of the school year, she uses Walkabouts as a spiral review. She says it is a great tool “to review the material from the beginning of the year to see if they remember the concepts.” Some of her favorite lessons for her 2nd grade students have been on irregular spellings and vowel sounds. “The students participate and engage with the characters in a fun way — they don’t even realize they are learning concepts that I’ve been teaching them.” Elasky is also a very big fan of Walksheets, worksheets with a movement component. She says her students love starting with the movement activity at the top of the sheets. “The Walksheets are easy to understand and are not overwhelming for the students. They contain enough questions to see if a student has mastered a concept but not too many that it becomes busy work.” Also, as a 2nd grade teacher, one of the features that she appreciates most is that she is not limited to 2nd grade content. She can access 1st grade lessons to use with students who may need a review of previously taught material.

Elasky also sees behavior management benefits with her students. “My students encourage each other when they are playing Walkabouts, and the platform reinforces when they are doing things right, so the positive feedback is great.”  She says the movement-based activities also provide a quick and informal assessment of who understands the content and who may need a little more help.

Recommendations

Elasky says she knows a couple of other teachers have been using Walkabouts, and she plans to recommend it for next year for those who have not used it yet. One reason she recommends the platform is there is no prep work needed by the teacher because the platform is very intuitive and easy to use.