15 Best exercise songs for children! What makes a song the best? Well, turn it up and see if your child dances and moves to it. Below are 15 of my top viewed music videos on YouTube, with a new one to start it off called “If I Were An Animal”. This video is 44 minutes long of straight dancing, jumping, spinning, twisting, balancing and wiggling!
When my little boy asks for one specific song over and over again, it’s officially the best! LOL! Isn’t that what we want for our children? To be happy, healthy and active. That’s why I started writing children’s music over 8 years ago. I saw what a powerful influence music had on my children. They learned, they moved and they bonded with other through it. Now, I am fortunate to have that connection with thousands of children yearly, when I perform for schools and audiences all over the country. It’s an amazing feeling to know we can communicate through music and movement. Try it!
Let me know how far you get in the video before you need a water break. LOL! 😉
-As Debra Viadero wrote: Exercise seen as priming pump for students’ academic strides! Case grows stronger for physical activity’s link to improved brain function.
Dr. Ratey is the author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Education and the Brain, a book published last month by Little, Brown and Co. It draws together emerging findings from neuroscientific, biomedical, and educational research that correlate exercise with a wide range of brain-related benefits—improving attention, reducing stress and anxiety, and staving off cognitive decline in old age, for example.
The interest in documenting a link between exercise and learning in children and adolescents comes as trends in physical activity seem to point in the opposite direction. Studies suggest that, with 30 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren classified as overweight, childhood obesity is reaching epidemic proportions.
Likewise, scientists are still not entirely sure how exercise primes the brain for learning. But, according to Dr. Ratey, they have some good ideas.
Laboratory studies in mice and humans, for instance, show that exercise prompts the brain to produce greater amounts of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF, which Dr. Ratey likes to call “Miracle-Gro” for the brain.
It encourages brain cells to sprout synapses, which are crucial to forming the connections the brain needs to make in order to learn. It also strengthens cells and protects them from dying out.
Other research also suggests that exercise plays a role in neurogenesis, the production of new brain cells, in middle-aged and older adults and in laboratory animals.