9 creative ways to get your pupils moving in the classroom 

18 February 2025

Despite being popular with students, the amount of physical activity children participate in at school is declining dramatically, including dance and PE, due to lack of access and loss of funding. Physical movement in schools not only tackles inactivity and obesity levels but also impacts positively on academic performance.

Medical guidelines say that children and young people aged 5 to 18 should ‘aim for an average of at least 60 minutes of moderate or vigorous intensity physical activity a day across the week’, in a variety of intensities spread out across the day, and ‘reduce the time spent sitting or lying down and break up long periods of not moving with some activity’. We know that most children are not currently meeting this expectation. And as research suggests that physical movement actually supports learning, this means that children need to get moving more in the classroom – and it doesn’t need to just be through P.E lessons.

Here we have outlined a few resources to support teachers in being creative when getting your kids up and active!

“You might have your children sitting down for an hour, but are they actually engaged for an hour?” – Bryn Llewellyn

1. Understand why it is important to get your pupils moving.

Why do we need to include more physical learning in the classroom? Listen to some highlights from our Critical Curriculum Podcast episode exploring 'Why we need to move more in the classroom' to find out! Do we need to sit to learn all the time? How would moving more help teachers and pupils?

2. Listen to these quick tips for injecting some movement to your classroom

In our Critical Curriculum Podcast episode, Exploring the importance of physical learning in our classrooms, Simon Pittman and Bryn Llewellyn provide some time-saving and easy ways for even the least-confident teachers to use creative movement games and ice-breakers for teamwork, critical thinking skills, memory, listening and understanding concepts. They advise starting small – such as using a Pomodoro Counter, and building up from there. Listen to their tips in our highlights of the episode: Tips to get your students moving more.

3. Use our Teaching for Creativity Resources

Lots of our Teaching for Creativity Taster Card resources ask children to get up and move. For example (from the Primary and Secondary sets): Four Corners, Machines of Learning, Tableau Tree and Figurative Finders Keepers; and from the Climate Change & Sustainability set: Freeze Frame and Working Together For Change (both of which would work in other topics). These quick and playful creative activities will fit into your existing learning and take almost no preparation time.

4. Check out Tagtiv8

Tagtiv8 have products, resources, CPD and workshops available to support you with incorporating physical learning across all school subjects, especially in maths and English (phonics and spelling). Their games provide an enjoyable alternative to classroom based learning and promote physical activity and were developed from evidence based research.

You can listen to founder Bryn Llewellyn discussing examples in the third episode of our Critical Curriculum Podcast – Exploring the importance of physical learning in our classrooms.

Find out more about our Critical Curriculum Podcast

5. Change the whole school ethos with Move &Learn

Get whole school training with Move & Learn, the community interest organisation that helped develop Tagtiv8. You can also read their book: How to Move & Learn: An evidence-based guide to embedding physically active learning in your school by Bryn Llewellyn , Ian Holmes , Richard Allman, and watch their TEDx Talk.

6. Book a Frantic workshop

In our Curriculum Podcast episode 3 Exploring the importance of physical learning in our classrooms, you can hear theatre director, movement director and creative associate at Frantic Assembly, Simon Pittman discussing how the Frantic Method of drama can inspire students as an accessible and empowering approach to physicality and collaboration. Frantic work with over 14,500 young people aged 14+ every year, supporting the current curriculum. They offer a range of workshops and residencies for students that support, develop and enhance learning around Physical Theatre and Devising.

7. Listen to our podcast about how to use drama in the classroom

Drama is such an easy way to get students up and moving, even if it is only briefly! In another of our Critical Curriculum Podcast episodes - How can we support children's wellbeing through drama? - drama practitioners Hannah Joyce and Aileen Gonsalves discuss drama as a subject and a tool to utilise across the curriculum, giving insights, strategies and techniques including ideas for games, warm up exercises and teacher-in-role style activities.

Listen to our shorter highlights: of the episode:

Tips for using drama in the classroom

Why drama in the classroom is important

Listen to the full episode

8. Read about Embodied Learning with PlanBee

Have a read of this blog from PlanBee about why embodied learning is important and explore how it works, with tips to help you integrate movement into your teaching practice and suggestions of PlanBee resources which can support you.

“Embodied learning relates to teaching strategies which engage and make use of movement and the body to support effective learning.”

9. Try out Now Press Play

Now Press Play is an immersive audio resource connecting primary school children to their learning through sound, storytelling and movement. Each child puts headphones on to listen to various experiences supporting literacy and oracy, while also getting up out of their seats! Children are encouraged to physically move while listening, creating a magical and meaningful lessons such as fighting a woolly mammoth in the Stone Age or saving the rarest plant in the world.

Watch it in action