Why Brain Breaks Are Effective
Have you ever sat through a teacher professional development meeting and at the one-hour mark kept thinking when is this going to end? You stop listening to the presenter, you lose your focus, and you are not absorbing anything that is being said. The same goes for the students in your classes!
We all need short mental breaks to help us refocus and re-energize. Evidence has shown that brain breaks help students be more productive and increase their cognitive abilities.
Brain breaks are designed to get students up and moving. They have spent enough time on a lesson learning a math concept or identifying the main idea and supporting details in a story.
In order for them to be able to transition and start learning something new, like science or social studies, or continue practicing the same topic, they need time to revitalize their minds.
What is a brain break? Brain breaks can be either educational or just fun. They have the students out of their seats and communicating with each other. A teacher can incorporate something that they are learning in the brain break or have it be completely different.
Brain Breaks Your Students Will Love
Freeze Dance
It is dance party time! Your students will love to get out of their seats and start dancing to their favorite songs. You can have students request songs to be played during this great, easy brain break. You have the students dancing and when the music stops, they must freeze and not move. Whoever is still dancing when the music stops is out of the game.
Yoga
Calling all yogis! Sitting at a desk, working hard on a task can lead to neck and back pain. Try reaching out to your local yoga studios to get some advice on great yoga moves to lead your students. It will get their blood flowing to their muscles and energize them for the rest of the school day. You can even find Yoga Bingo which have cards with pictures of the yoga moves right on them.
Simon Says
This classic game will have your students laughing and enjoying themselves the entire time. Teachers and students can take turns being “the Simon.” Students must do the action the caller says as long as the caller first states “Simon Says.” If the caller has not said that and students complete the action, they are out.
Pictionary
You can either buy the original game or create the game on your own. You can even incorporate vocabulary you are learning that week in class. A teacher creates a stack of cards with words on it. Break the class into two teams, small groups or however you feel would work best for your students. Then, teammates take turns picking a card from the deck. They have a certain amount of time to draw the object on the card, and their teammates have to guess it. If the team does not guess the word in the time period, the other team can guess and steal the points. Pictionary really gets the creative juices flowing both for the drawer and the guessers!
Charades
Movement is the best! This fun game challenges students to not use their voices at all. Students have to pick a card with an activity or object on it. They have to act it out in the hopes that their teammates will guess what is on the card.
Dice Game
This is a brain break that a teacher can buy or just create on her own. A teacher can break students into pairs or do it as a whole class. You need one die and a poster with an activity to go with each side of the die. For example, if you roll a two — that activity is jumping jacks. If you roll a five — students have to hop on one foot.
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Pair students up and have them play the best out of five. You can also have an inner circle and an outer circle and rotate every 60 seconds so that the students have an opportunity to play against multiple classmates.
Would You Rather
Teachers can find many “Would You Rather” exercise games online or you can create them on your own. A teacher creates a slide to be projected in the front of the class with two choices — for example would you rather swim in a pool or in the ocean. Then, there is a corresponding exercise that the students complete for 30 seconds to show what their choice is.
Go Noodle
Go Noodle is a wonderful online resource that has so many brain breaks just for fun and on educational topics. You will be singing and skip counting while dancing or learning phonics while jumping around. Go Noodle brain breaks definitely worth checking out.
Remember, brain breaks are meant to be fun! Get your students up and moving. These breaks help students be more productive and even increase their social and emotional growth. Make sure to build it into your daily classroom routines and change it up. There are hundreds of great brain breaks for kids out there.
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