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Piercy et al., 2018), this minimum includes180 minutes of physical activity during
the day, including 60 minutes of medium-high intensity, as well as a ban on passive,
sedentary behavior of more than 60 minutes a day. This means that during the rest of
their waking hours, children must be active, even if their actions are not focused on
the movement of the body but are incidental movements done as part of other tasks.
The prices of sedentary behavior are high. From a health point of view, sedentary
behavior is one of the main reasons for children’s excess weight (Gaba et al., 2020).
Dr. Ella Shoval is At the same time, children have diseases that have not been observed in the past,
retired head of the Early such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, blood lipids, and metabolic problems (Dubose
Childhood Department et al., 2006) that appear to develop as a result of inactivity. In addition, although
at The Academic College
at Wingate in Israel. At children are less active and less likely to move, a steady increase in the number of
the heart of her research limb fractures (Flynn et al., 2015) suggests the general weakening of the body from
is the question of the sedentary behavior.
impact of physical activity Lack of physical activity at a reasonable level and of good quality affects not
on academic and social only children’s health but also the motor, personality, social, and cognitive domains
learning. Shoval develops (Sterdt et al., 2014). In the field of motor development, the impact relates to balance,
programs, models, and
trains teachers to use motor coordination, development of transferability, and mastery of basic skills such
movement as a tool in as running, jumping, hopping, and somersaults on the ground (Lloyd et al., 2014;
their teaching. elas@ Payne & Isaacs, 2017). In the area of children’s personality development, the influence
wincol.ac.il touches on many points, from the ability to regulate behavior to the development of
self-esteem (Schwarzer, 2014). The connection between movement experience and
the sensory and perceptual system has been known for many years (Heuer, 2016),
and in recent years, significant links have also been found between physical activity
and cognitive elements, such as attentional focus, memory improvement (Kane,
2015), and executive management functions (van der Niet et al., 2015).
Nowadays, when children stay in school for about half of their waking hours
and—including after-school programs—even longer, school leaders must take
responsibility for promoting an active lifestyle. The question immediately arises: Is
this going to happen at the expense of academic achievements? And then arises the
question: How do you do it? We make a first step in answering these two questions
in this article.

The Contribution of Mindful Movement to Academic Learning
Many studies deal with the impact of movement intervention programs on
academic achievement (e.g., Sethu & Ramakrishnan, 2018; Singh et al., 2019). The
studies that have taken place in various frameworks include all ages from 3-year-
olds to university students. These studies show that the assumption that children
learn better while sitting than with movement is not only detrimental to health but
may also harm children’s learning (Allar et al., 2018).
The academic achievements examined as being influenced by movement
intervention programs touch on many and varied topics: mathematics (e.g., Mavilidi
et al., 2018) and science studies (e.g., Plummer, 2009); first language learning (e.g.,
Kirk & Kirk, 2016) and second language learning (e.g., Toumpaniari et al., 2015); and
learning in the social sciences (e.g., Fulginiti, 2009). It seems that the choice of the
subject of study in which the academic achievements are expressed is not essential.
Any subject that is related to the reality that surrounds the child, that has at least
one aspect of the components of movement—space, time, power—and that includes
references to the self and those around one can be learned through movement.
Studies present many processes in which mindful movement contributes to

18 The Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin: International Journal for Professional Educators