Taking frequent brain breaks throughout the day can energize students, increase focus, and aid memory retention! By taking just a couple of minutes for a brain break, you can maximize your instruction time while helping your students' learning. I have found that having quick and effective brain breaks on-hand makes my classroom management far more effective. Here are 5 fun brain breaks my students love that can easily be used in any classroom.
These Classroom Brain Break Activity Dice come with 72 different brain breaks. I keep a bucket of them at the front of the room and when we need a brain break, we just roll one of the dice, set a timer and students do the activity for the allotted time. What I like about these dice is that they get my students up and moving, which helps get out some of their energy and allow them to continue to focus on our learning. One of my students' favorite ones is to do a pretend snowball fight for 1 minute! It's so much fun!
Even though these Dry Erase Would You Rather Prompts were meant to be a writing activity, I use the prompts as a brain break. I read one of the prompts on a card and then designate 2 spots in the room, one for each answer. Students need to go to the side of the room that matches their response and then they explain their reason to someone on their side. You can also switch it up and have them pair up with someone on the opposing side and then have them decide if they'd like to change their answer. It's a fun movement, listening, and speaking brain break! Plus, it helps build classroom community as students get to learn more about each other.
For this brain break students work as partners. They each get a plastic headband and then share a set of cards from the Forehead Guessing Game. I set a timer and students work in pairs to guess as many cards as they can. Partner #1 puts the card into Partner #2's headband and gives clues about what it is. When Partner #2 guesses correct, he or she gets to keep the card and Partner #1 puts in another card and they keep playing until the time runs out. Then the partners switch rolls and the timer is set again. The person with the most cards at the end of the 2 rounds wins.
The What Am I? Guessing Card Game is a quick and easy game to pull out for a brain break. I pull a card and read the clues to the class. Students have to guess what it is based on the clues. For example, in the card shown here they guessed a rainbow! To add an element of movement, students can act out the answer for 10 seconds. Depending on how long it takes students to guess, you can get a couple of cards in for a brain break.
When you need your students to get some wiggles out, using the Brain Break Aisle Runner is sure to help! We roll it out on the floor and choose one of the students in the class to lead the rest of the students through the brain break. As the lead student goes through the aisle runner they call out what the rest of the class needs to do by their seats. I use a number system in my class where each student has a number, so I just pull out a number stick to choose the class brain break leader. The runner can be a little slippery on the floor, but after I modeled how to use it the kids did fine on it. The kids love this brain break so much and can't wait for me to pull it out to use!