20 Three-Minute Brain Breaks. Wednesday's guest post about why kids need to move from pediatric occupational therapist Loren Shlaes was so popular that I decided to follow it up with a list of Brain Breaks you can use with your students.
These are great to use anytime your students are feeling restless and are struggling to pay attention. Most of these will only take a few minutes, and then you can get back to the lesson with your students ready to focus on the lesson at hand.5-4-3-2-1. In this simple game, students stand up and the teacher (or leader) has them do five different movements in descending order. For example the teacher would say: "Do fivejumping jacks, spin around four times, hop on one foot threetimes, walk all the way around the classroom two times, give your neighbor one high-five (pausing in between each task for students to do it).Trading Places Have students stand behind their pushed-in chairs.
Please note that I did not come up with all of these out of my own head. Mindset Works®: Student Motivation through a Growth Mindset, by Carol Dweck, Ph.D. BrainWorks - UWTV.org. Brain Facts and Figures. Models. Experiments and Activities. Www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el200912_willis.pdf. Health and Learning:How to Teach Students About the Brain. If we want to empower students, we must show them how they can control their own cognitive and emotional health and their own learning.
Teaching students how the brain operates is a huge step. Even young students can learn strategies for priming their brains to learn more efficiently; I know, because I've taught both 5th graders and 7th graders about how their brains learn. I was a practicing neurologist before I became a teacher. Once I entered the classroom and observed how my students learned, the connections between my two professions became clear.
I began to write about brain-based teaching strategies. Test My Brain. Birmingham Grid for Learning - Multiple Intelligences (Primary)