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I'm having a bit of a Cognitive Load Theory day today. I want to highlight a few findings from this 2011 paper by Paas and Sweller (thread) link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Pupils often learn better when teachers make gestures while explaining an idea, when compared to verbal-only explanations. 
But it's not just teachers who benefit. Pupils who mimic and repeat taught gestures seem to learn more.
Gesture while learning appears to allow pupils to construct better understanding more easily.
Interestingly, it doesn't seem to matter what the gestures are - this study found that it made no difference if gestures were related or not to the problem at hand
Explanations around this effect seem to be the same as the ones made for Dual Coding - the idea that learning is better and easier when both parallel channels of the working memory are activated together - verbal/auditory and visual/spacial/motor.
Intriguingly, the impact of this movement-enhanced dual coding seemed to occur even if the movement was virtual (objects moved on a screen) or even imagined.
Separately, this paper also notes that we have an innate ability to extract meaning from watching human movement. While we generally learn better from still, simplified diagrams than from animations, this isn't the case when observing human movement.
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