One of the problems I found in my classroom was that the students were not all connected in a way that

made everyone comfortable to speak Spanish. Some were more advanced and participated actively, while others could always sit back and did not speak at all. There was also some conflict between students fighting openly in class, as well as one student getting laughed at for responding seriously to some questions. I wanted to give students less chance to conflict with one another and more chance to do things that would put everyone in a similar position that could help them bond to create a more comfortable environment for speaking and sharing. Additionally another problem was that most students were not retaining vocabulary and not able to recall, speak or write it except when they had the vocabulary quiz. In efforts to more deeply engage students in the lesson and encourage their language production to increase, I decided to integrate more kinesthetic activities into the classroom. Through research, I discovered the effectiveness of kinesthetic activities in terms of learning, but also thought that they provided a means for students to "break the ice" with one another, ultimately becoming more comfortable and building classroom community, therefore decreasing anxiety and increasing language output. In my research, I investigated the effectiveness of kinesthetic teaching such as TPR and the integration of stress balls. The articles that I found expressed effectiveness of kinesthetic learning and encouraged me to pursue the approach. In Kinesthetic Reinforcement- Is it a Boon to Learning?, movement in the classroom says that movement helps students to more effectively learn, "...in paring words with native-language words as compared to pairing them with pictures of objects or movements, results generally support the notion that meanings are learned more efficiently and retained longer when words are directly associated with the objects, actions, or movements they represent." (Bohrer, 14). An additionally study from St. John's University in New York compared traditional learning to kinesthetic and said that "student achievement was measured and the data showed significantly higher short and long term word recall scores when students were instructed through Tactual/Kinesthetic

instructional methods over the Traditional", (Masera) the data also showed that "students enjoyed learning with Tactual/Kinestehtic resources more than other methods" (Masera). These talk about movement positively impacting student's retainment of vocabulary and enjoyment of class. I saw the connection t my problems of classroom community and students retaining vocabulary, thus, I explored kinesthetic learning in terms of TPR by talking to teachers in the department. I talked to a four different teachers and a couple of colleagues about how they used TPR or found it effective. The German teacher that I talked to said that he used it for more his level ones and twos when he practiced commands, verbs, or used it as warm ups and pointed to things. The colleague that I talked to expressed that his games were effective and the way he did assessments were effective. She shared a variety of games with me that involved a lot of student movement and said that his assessments involved students acting out the movements and him assessing them holistically or individually coming up to do the movements. Another teacher that I talked to did assessment in a different way where students would write the word as she did the movements. The other language teachers all used TPRS more than just TPR. They expressed that it needed to be used tactfully because otherwise students and teacher alike would get bored. I also talked a colleague in class that uses TPRS in her classroom. She said that it is very slow and the students only learn about six vocabulary words over a long stretch of time. Since my class has many vocabulary words for each Unit, I had to think about how I could integrate TPR or TPRS in a way that could still be applicable to all my classes. Talking to these teachers helped me to think about TPR in a way that I can use it to make class more interesting, but not use it to a point of overkill. In exploring kinesthetic articles, I also discovered an article by Stalvey and Brasell that talked about the positive effects of stress balls for students. The main emphasis of the article was that stress balls were effective "when students used them in groups". These resources helped me to think of how I could integrate the stress balls in a meaningful way that could beneficial for students. All of the teachers that I talked to in the department had never used stress balls in their classrooms before.

I first bought stress balls that students were able to use during their presentations, test taking, or just to generally hold on to during class. They were allowed to continue using these as long as they did not abuse the privileges of having them, such as throwing, ripping them apart, or drawing on them. I also used stress balls in group activities that involved chance to help students become more of a team and lessen the focus on the students that "always" participate. The game that I used made it so that everyone had to participate and it was by pure chance that the ball would stop on them. The games were similar to musical chairs in this regard. In addition to having these kinesthetic outputs, I also integrated activities that would get the class moving such as yoga, acting out songs and vocabulary words, and games that required students to move and act out vocabulary words. Examining my recordings and the data that I have collected, I can conclude that the increase in language production was small, and that the student engagement and class community increased. The second way of integrating kinesthetic learning that I did was giving the students movements for ten words from their vocabulary list and then giving them a movement quiz at the end of the week. When we first did the movements, I told the students that they could come up with the actions. I would call on a student who was raising his or her hand to do one movement and then after they showed us the movement, as a class we mimicked their movement while saying the vocabulary word. We did this for the entire list and then everyday in class. We practiced movements where one section of the class did the movement then the next group did another movement and we circle around the room. On another day, we did the movements with our eyes closed. On the day of the quiz, I quizzed them on five words. I allowed them to "choose" the movements that they wanted on the quiz by having them raise their hands if they had a specific one in mind. I then called on them to do the movement that I would mimic it in front of the class. The class would then write this movement down. I found that for this quiz, many students did well, although when I asked them to recall the words later without the movements and not in a quiz format, only about half of the students were able to come up with the words well.

I thought to integrate stress balls from reading an article by Stalvey and Brasell, in which they found stress ball to decrease distraction and improve their students' abilities to write in their language arts class. They also noted that kinesthetic learners in class used the stress balls more often than the other children. I wanted to use this to see if the stress balls would have an equal appeal to my high school students and if they would be beneficial for kinesthetic learners in my classroom as well. The stress balls I bought had animal faces on them, and over the weeks the students would use the Spanish names of the stress balls such as "mono" or "elefante" without having to think about it. When I first brought them to class the students were very excited. A couple students said, "I love the stress balls! No teacher has ever offered me a stress ball before - it really helped!". After a couple weeks of using these, students would come into the class in the morning asking to use a "baln de stres" for other classes if they had a test. They would return them and talk about "how much it helped them during the test." Initially, in order to see if the stress balls were helpful, I designed a student survey to see how useful the students found the stress balls to be. I had the students rate on a one to five scale - one being the least effective and five being the highest their opinion on the stress balls. I asked them questions about usefulness in terms of anxiety, language production during presentations, ability to recall vocabulary words on quizzes and tests, the importance of choosing their own color/animal, and if they wanted to see the stress balls used more in class. Most students found that they relieved their anxiety during their presentations and tests, and that they would like to use the stress balls more in class. Another question I asked was if students found them to bothersome, and if the stress balls helped them to produce more Spanish. Almost none of the students said that the stress ball was bothersome. Some students said that stress ball helped them to produce more Spanish, but other said it did not help at all. These results were pretty much divided half and half, and were thus inconclusive in terms of the student survey form. From recording my classes and making general observations, I noticed that the stress balls were especially comforting for students during tests. The way that I observed my recordings of class was that I

compared the previous classroom behavior of other videos to the videos where students were allowed to have the stress balls in activities, presentations and tests. I analyzed their behavior in terms of attention to me, taking notes, conflict with other people and listening to their conversation while working in groups. I also especially compared students who used the stress balls during the presentations versus those who did not, and found that students who did use the stress ball to be especially nervous with speaking and fidgety during their presentations. There were also a couple of students that usually had trouble participating that particularly gravitated toward them every day in class. One student would go to the box right about and pick out her favorite "tigre" and have it sitting on her desk all of class. I noticed that she became less defensive in class when she had the tiger stress ball with her, and that she participated better in group activities; she had previously shown a lot of attitude that seemed to lessen when she had her stress ball near-by. Overall, observing students while they were taking tests, the students who had the stress balls tended to fidget less, or take out their anxiety on the actual stress ball by holding it for the entire duration of the test. One student wrote in Spanish on his test that "he loved his monkey stress ball". In addition to allowing students to use stress balls during class, for presentations and during tests, I also integrated them into games that we did. We would pass the stress ball around during a game that is similar to musical chairs. During this game I also had students act out vocabulary words that symbolized certain point values. When we played this game a second time the students acted out the actions more automatically than they had the previous time that we played. Overall the game brought the students together and established strong connections for the classroom community. The enjoyed the game but could relate to one another because of the surprise of never knowing where the ball would end up when the music was stopped. They also had to work as a team to all get the right answer so that when the music stopped and the ball stopped on a specific person, that person would have to have the correct answer to represent the team. The stress balls used in the games also helped the

classroom community; I observed two students who had previously bickered because one was critical of another for being "dumb". After being on another's team, they seemed to get along better with one another. Another key way that I incorporated kinesthetic learning into the classroom was with body part vocabulary, which I found to be very beneficial for the students. I incorporated yoga into the classroom by having an authentic Spanish video of a yoga teacher who used many of the vocabulary words that were from their list. The whole class got up and we did simple yoga together, as I repeated important words and movements from the video that were also from their vocabulary list. I found this to be effective because on the final exams many of the students chose the option to draw and label body parts. They all did very well on this section, even the students who usually struggle with vocabulary. In addition to helping students succeed on their final, this activity promoted classroom community because many students really got into it, and could laugh at one another when they could not do some of the stretches. In conclusion, I found that kinesthetic learning was mostly beneficial for building classroom community, but has potential to help students retain words when used strategically. The stress balls helped to relieve student anxiety and encouraged a small amount of language production from the students. The students genuinely enjoyed having them. They therefore, have potential to encourage even more student language production in the future if I can better integrate them into activities. Additionally, the use of the stress balls and movements in games helped students to work together and more automatically connect words with motions. During the stressful time of finals week, students could laugh at one another while doing yoga, but were also practicing their vocabulary in an authentic circumstance to use the body parts terminology. This helped many of them to succeed on the body portion of the test where they had to produce such vocabulary. Overall, I can conclude that the kinesthetic learning and practices I used in the classroom were most beneficial academically when

students had a specific instance that directly connected the vocabulary to, yet the kinesthetic approach also contributed to an important part classroom management -- establishing a strong classroom community. From this experience, I hope to more deeply think about how I can create kinesthetic activities to help create authentic circumstances for student learning, as well as further explore how to build a strong culture of classroom community that will allow my student the level of comfort that they need to succeed.