Our students should have a kinesthetic brain break every 25-30 minutes. Brain breaks are refreshing to students and teachers alike. They do take some time out of class, but the efficiency of our students goes up when we incorporate them. Please comment if you have variations on a particular brain break.
Using Brain Breaks in my classes has helped my students to refocus and stay fresh. I have used them with pre-schoolers to nursing home residents. It helps to break up the class period by having a change of pace. Since I use SMARTBoard notebook lessons every day in class, I put a slide that said "BRAIN BREAK" directly into my lessons. Then I changed to actually taking a screen capture of the pages of the book and putting these into my lessons. This has helped me to remember the steps of the Brain Break and also for my students to see the steps and follow them on their own. The beautiful thing about this is that I didn't have to pull up a Brain Break on the fly. I ALREADY HAD IT IN MY LESSON. So, I thought that I would share this version with you. It is called Energizing Brain Breaks SMARTBoard Edition with Video Links. Yes, it has every one of the 50 activities in it. They each are on separate slides. There is a link to a video of the Brain Break right on the slide itself, so you can watch the Brain Break with your class or audience if you like. The PowerPoint version is almost identical. If you use PowerPoint Presentation for your teaching, this would be a valuable tool. You can just copy the Brain Break slide and put it easily into your own Presentation. Then you can just have the Brain Break planned right in your lesson.
They are downloads. There is no shipping.
The book includes all 50 Brain Breaks. It also has a companion website that allows you to view all 50 videos of the Brain Breaks. The companion website also gives you access to the SMARTBoard Version of the Brain Breaks as well as the PowerPoint Version of the Brain Breaks. It's a BESTSELLER.
Teacher at Naperville Central High School, Naperville IL.
Family: Married with 3 children
Coach: High School Soccer
Technology: I get one release period to promote the technology in our Math Department.