Stand Up Desks

I love this story. Why didn’t someone think of this years ago?

If you have a child with ADHD, is energetic or fidgety, you know that school can become a battle ground. Johnny won’t sit still. Johnny won’t stay in his seat. Johnny is always fidgeting. It can be frustrating for both the parent and the child and the child truly can’t help it. It is a chemical disorder in the child’s brain.

There is good news. A teacher decided to work with these kids and designed a desk that allows kids to stand up while at their desk, which also allows them to “fidget” by shifting their weight, moving their feet or whatever else they need to do. Another school is allowing the kids to sit on stability balls, rather than traditional chairs at desks. This allows the kids to be able to move around at their desk without disrupting the class.

Some kids truly do learn better when they are moving. Personally, I’m a hands on learner. I learn better by doing rather than listening. When I take my Lay Ministry classes, I knit through most of the class. I just can’t sit still that long and our kids are much the same. By allowing our kids movement that doesn’t disrupt the class, we may actually help our children to learn better.

Once I began to learn about different learning styles and incorporated them into my Sunday school classes, I noticed that I had a better behaved class.

One of the bad things that schools do is when children are disruptive they tend to take away a privilege for the child. Generally recess. For our kids that need the movement, this only makes matters worse. The children have no way to release the energy so their behavior becomes worse. My son’s IEP actually had an intervention built in where the special education teacher could give him additional recess or laps around the track if he was disrupting the class. It may seem like a reward, but it helped the entire class. We also had it written in that taking away recess was not to be used as a consequence. He could stay after school, be given extra homework, or any number of other things, but he must be allowed to go to recess.

Sixth graders in the classroom of the teacher who designed the stand up desks tested several prototypes and gave their input before the design was finalized. What better group to have test the desks?

Hopefully these desks will show up in schools across the country very soon. I know my son certainly would have benefited from something like this.

Photo credit

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