 The impact of movement on children's academic performance and brain function is also accumulating. What we already know is that movement matters when it comes to academic performance and engagement. So if we're engaged in physical education, recess, classroom physical activity, or extracurricular physical activities, these all have strong relationships with several measures of academic performance and engagement. The findings that I've put up here come from 50 studies and there are more growing as we speak, particularly a guy named Charles Hillman out of the University of Illinois. He's doing a lot of important work. The article that I provided, Judy and Linda, that'll be put up cites every one of these studies. So it tells you all about what they did and you can go find them. A lot of them are open source articles, but there's a lot of evidence. But with all the time demands of the curriculum, teachers might want to forego giving kids physical activity or PE. And I've heard many teachers say, right, but I don't have any time to give more physical activity or physical education. I hear that a lot, right? But the evidence is absolutely contrary to that thinking. There are no negative academic effects of giving more physical activity or for more physical education. If we add more physical activity or PE to the curriculum, I'm not advocating that, a plug-in dance or music, movement stuff. If we add more of that, kids perform better academically and get the health benefits of moving. Or they don't perform any worse and they get the benefits of moving, okay? So to be clear, there are no negative effects of physical activity or physical education on academic performance. So let me show you some data. These studies come from large-ish-sized school districts, five to 12,000 students in each one of these studies. So let me tell you about each one of them. They doubled physical activity during the school day in the study by Carlson and an increased academic test scores. When they added physical activity to a classroom settings, they found no negative effect on math or spelling scores. I'm gonna talk to you a little more about this Stevens study, then they increased physical activity through integrating classroom activities in math and reading specifically. Math and reading scores went up. They doubled and even tripled physical education time, no negative effects on academic performance. And in a study in Australia, they added 75 minutes of PE a day, no negative effect on test scores, standardized test scores. So let me tell you a little bit more about the physical activity across the curriculum study. So there were 24 schools randomly assigned to intervention. The intervention was classroom activity and 10 to the control, 5,000 students, grades two to five. What they did was they increased the physical activity levels of the kids through integrating physical activity into language arts and math. What did the teacher say? It was a great teaching strategy to break up monotony. What did they find? Significant improvements in math and spelling scores. And then they asked the kids, the kids' enjoyment of lessons increased when you added the physical activity. And I know there are some classroom management issues around moving kids in the class, but like I say, once you get that down, experienced teachers can do that fairly easily. There are no negative effects. So this example actually highlights how physical activity was successfully integrated into classrooms, led to improvement in academic scores, led to student enjoyment of lessons, and the movement benefited the kids. Do you want more data? There's more activity equals more ACE. So in studies where there were active adolescents defined as kids who were participating extracurricular physical activities, intramurals, or elected PE, they all had more ACE. Study by the CDC, a randomized study across the US. What this study showed was that a higher proportion, this is the higher proportion of students who received mostly Ds and Fs were either not meeting physical activity guidelines or watched more TV. But even more compelling is this evidence that better fitness equals better grades. So the previous research that I showed you and was cited is basically research where we've increased physical activity and physical education, and we haven't measured fitness. And participating in physical activity and physical education doesn't always lead to improvements in fitness, but improving fitness is pretty compelling. So in some states in the US, they have a test called FitnessGram, and they mandated across the state. And the FitnessGrams test five components of health-related fitness. Cardiovascular fitness, flexibility, body composition, muscular strength, and muscular endurance of kids. So all kids in these states have to do this test. And in the states, they also have standardized achievement tests, so they have all these data. And so, what's taken together with three million students. So I don't know if there's not three million students in BC, is there? Three million students, the most strongest and the strongest and most consistent predictor of higher scores on standardized tests was aerobic fitness. So the question becomes for some people, well, how does movement make us smarter? And I'm using that term liberally, right? Smarter is, right? But how does it make us smarter? So many of you've probably seen this, right? There was this book that came out by a Harvard psychiatrist named John Rady, and it's called Spark. And it kind of, evidence was already, you know, accumulating for exercise and brain function. But when he published this book, you know, the media attention skyrocketed. And research dollars have continued to flow heavily into this area of research. And in particular, research on physical activity, fitness, and children's brain development. And so now we actually have some pretty good clues as to how movement makes us smarter. So by monitoring electrical activity in the brain, scientists have demonstrated that fit kids have different levels of brain activity than low fit kids. P3 waves are one thing that they measure and it's a measure associated with evaluating and categorizing information. So humans with higher P3 waves score better on tests of cognitive function and decision making. We also have these MRI technologies that help us discover that people who are more aerobically fit have bigger hippocampi, right? The hippocampus plays a critical role in the formation of new memories, long-term memory, and spatial navigation, okay? And in fact, elderly populations and disease populations, like people with Alzheimer's, they have decreased or shrunken hippocampi, right? Associated with a loss of neurons. The good news is that all the research that they're doing, particularly with older adults, is that with 30 minutes of activity a day, you can actually increase your hippocampus size. So scrap the Sudoku and go for a walk, right? And people are sitting down and doing a walk, just move, right, and keep your head up. Don't look down, keep your head up. Get spatial, right? And finally, this thing called brain-derived neurotropic factor. Rady calls it miracle growth for the brain, and it's important for memory and learning. And when you know it, right? Exercise elevates this miracle growth for the brain, particularly aerobic activity. So the kind of aerobic activity that increases aerobic fitness. So you go back to the studies in California and Texas, these kids with high levels of aerobic fitness scoring well on standardized attests of achievements, whether you agree with those or not, I'm just sharing the data, right? There's quite a connection. So neuroscience is closing that loop on the connection between movement and mental progress. We know that. But we can also come at the concept of movement is academic from the things that are closer to my heart, right? Movement is multi-sensory, right? I get worried we're creating a dual sensory environment of seeing and hearing. And when we move we have to integrate the senses from our body into our brain and we have to interpret that and then we have to make decisions based on that information. So when we engage the body, we engage the brain, right? So movement is quite literally a full body and brain activity. We can't deny that. And movement is cross-disciplinary and that's why it's academic, right? If you want physics, I'll give you acceleration, deceleration, friction, levers, gravity, right? You want to talk about math. Baseball is made for statisticians. They make movies about that, right? And you can't talk about squash or sailing or badminton without talking about geometry. So how about social studies? It's a natural fit, right? Sport and activity are in all cultures. We can explore all cultures. Way back to the times of bread and circus or the times of the Stanley Cup playoffs, modern time bread and circus, right? And language arts is a great place for students to write and communicate about movement experiences. What about photography and movement? The human aesthetic and movement are timeless topics. And I always say physical educators should be exploiting the cross-disciplinary nature of movement to enhance the relevance of their classes. And so should classroom teachers. So should classroom teachers. We are part artists, part animal, part scholar and part saint. But first, be a good animal and move. Be a good little animal. You know, the smallest animals are the most rambunctious, right?