Day 10 Brain Breaks

On the Free Technology for Teachers Facebook, the twenty day blogging challenge created by Kelly Hines was mentioned and I decided to give it a shot. So here is the challenge for today:

“Share ideas that your classroom uses for brain breaks and/or indoor recess.”

Sometimes when the students are in a bad mood or when nothing is going is going right no matter what we do. Life gets frustrating and it is time to take a break.

Here are some of the possibilities when I want the class to take a break.

1. Break up in groups and play board games they are familiar with.

2. Discuss a possible social situation and brainstorm different appropriate ways to act.

3. Pick a current events issue that is a hot topic in the news and discuss it.

4. Break up in small groups. Give them one word with a lot of letters like elephant, alphabet, and encyclopedia. Have them use only the letters in that word to make up other words.

5. Play Pictionary with the class. Give the leader a secret word and they have to draw the picture of it. The person who guesses it right gets to come up and draw.

6. Play Mad Libs using parts of speech.

7. Read a fun story to the class.

8. Play music and have students draw a picture of what they imagine is happening.

9. Finish the sentence game. Give students the beginning of the sentence and have them finish it. Examples would be: If I was a bird, I would be…If I could live anywhere, I would live…If I had a million dollars, I would…

10. Play a bingo game. Have the questions made in advance for this occasion. Write the answers on the board in scrambled order. Have students make a grid on their paper of 9 or 16 blocks. They write the answer in each square. Then you will ask the question and if they have the answer, they put an X in the box. The first one to get any straight line across, down, or diagonally wins.

What do you do for brain breaks? Please share.

Image: 'Monopoly'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24742305@N00/5588594181
Found on flickrcc.net