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Move This World
Pros: Covers all grades; weekly lesson plans that blend instruction and movement.
Cons: Videos might move fast for some students and require pausing.
Bottom Line: This detailed yet easy-to-implement curriculum can provide classrooms and schools with a common language for social skills.
Move This World has 36 weeks of lessons that can carry a classroom through a school year. Teachers can easily navigate through each weekly plan, which includes two to three activities with written instructional plans and a corresponding video to present to students. Videos are short and fairly simple to follow, with only a few basic materials needed, such as a writing tool and a piece of paper. For teachers with students who have learning disabilities or diagnoses such as ADHD, some of the content could be challenging to process. For instance, some videos prompt students to draw, write down thoughts, complete motor actions in a coordinated way, or quickly identify conflicts or information within a short timeframe. That's why, in general, teachers should plan to be present to facilitate these lessons, with the aid of the video, rather than just relying on the video to do all of the instruction. The site is organized and easy to navigate for teachers who engage with students in more than one grade. Lessons can be semi-repetitive from one grade to the next, which is great for concept retention over time, but teachers should still be ready to pause the video to demonstrate further if needed. Teachers might also need to pause and assist students with some activities if they're struggling to recall memories or come up with answers on demand.
If Move This World really clicks in your classroom, it's also possible to incorporate the program daily -- perhaps as a warm-up prior to each class period. There's easily enough content to carry out this kind of implementation.
Move This World is a comprehensive social and emotional learning (SEL) curriculum for students of all ages that begins with the early childhood years (pre-K–K) and progresses through each grade, terminating in grade 12. There are 36 weeks of lessons in each of the courses, which are organized by grade. Each week there are a few lessons, many of which are meant to be repeated throughout the week or returned to throughout the year. Each lesson includes a written plan for teachers, along with a corresponding video to present to students. The multisensory, daily videos feature a diverse group of adults who teach students about feelings, emotions, and other social-emotional learning concepts. The video instruction is paired with different motor actions. Content focuses on social skills-building including empathy, active listening, impulse control, and conflict resolution. There's also a healthy focus on breathing and relaxation exercises. Each week includes a Move This World roundup, which lists competencies, skills, and objectives for learning. Lesson plans feature ideas for in-person and virtual facilitation. Verbal prompts help with classroom conversation. The website offers downloadable one-pagers to share with parents, as well as podcasts and webinars for teachers and basic progress tracking.
Move This World is an excellent learning tool that can help students build skills they can use to better interact with peers and understand how to manage their own complicated emotions. Just as students must learn how to read and write -- and enter school with varying skill levels -- students need social emotional skills and come to school at different developmental stages. Students need to be met where they're at, then taught strategies in a developmental progression to move forward. This can be daunting, and that's where Move This World shines. It provides a structured, easy-to-follow program for teachers to build social and emotional skills and learn strategies every day, without a lot of prep work. The videos are an accessible, plug-and-play way to teach the concepts. Teachers can just play them and let students follow the presenters, or pause and do more heavy facilitation. Some of the videos are older than others and have more distracting backgrounds; however, throughout all of the videos the actors are easy to understand and energetic, especially in the lower grade levels. There are some tweaks that could be made to the platform, most notably a way for teachers to set a start date for a course and then just see the content they should teach on any given day. As it is, there's some digging teachers need to do to find the content they'll be teaching any given week. It's not a huge problem, but something more automated would be a handy option.
Overall, this is a comprehensive curriculum that can offer a classroom, school, or district a shared approach to discussing and dealing with complicated emotions and concepts, while sharing strategies to improve their understanding and function at school. If classrooms make se of the family support resources, this common language can extend to home.