It’s important to take short breaks during a long work time to refresh your brain. Same for students; especially young students, new-to-learning in classrooms. For them it needs to include movement. Try these simple ideas during a 3-5 minute break.<\/p>\n
1.\u00a0 Stretching. <\/strong>Stand in an open space. Reach for the sky, the floor, the walls, behind you, your knees, your head (other directions) but don’t touch anyone while you move.<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0 Music. <\/strong>For whole class brain breaks sing popular chants and resurrect action songs like the Chicken Dance, Head-Shoulders-Knees-and Toes<\/em> or the Mac-arena<\/em>.<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0 Action Word Cards.<\/strong> Create a set of 30 action cards with writing that can be seen throughout the class. (Try 1\/3 sentence strips). Have the\u00a0 students perform the actions while standing alone (and without disrupting others). Use sight words from their reading like bend, jump, twist, hop, stare<\/em>. Add words that may challenge them: curtsy, strut, relax<\/em> (or whatever words you’re using that will stretch their visual vocabulary). Before each use, shuffle the cards and drop in a card with the word w-o-r-k. When that card becomes the top card, the action card, the students must return to their task. A side benefit of action cards is the quick review of the students ability to recognize sight words and\/or sound out words after a quick glance. They have fun, you can do a quick assessment and everyone gets a brain break.<\/p>\n When you finish your ‘break’, remember to redirect the students back to their task. Take that last moment to slow their movement, restate their goal and quiet their thinking by using calming words: “As you return to work, remember your working voice is quiet (or turned off) and your thinking is focused on today’s task (mention the task). Ready? 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.” <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s important to take short breaks during a long work time to refresh your brain. Same for students; especially young students, new-to-learning in classrooms. For them it needs to include movement. Try these simple ideas during a 3-5 minute break. 1.\u00a0 Stretching. Stand in an open space. Reach for the sky, the floor, the walls,\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[63,64,65],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-expectations-misbehavior-communication-clarifying-monitoring","tag-brain-breaks","tag-movement","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paddyeger.com\/blog\/educatingamericablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paddyeger.com\/blog\/educatingamericablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paddyeger.com\/blog\/educatingamericablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paddyeger.com\/blog\/educatingamericablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paddyeger.com\/blog\/educatingamericablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/paddyeger.com\/blog\/educatingamericablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paddyeger.com\/blog\/educatingamericablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paddyeger.com\/blog\/educatingamericablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paddyeger.com\/blog\/educatingamericablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}