Student Contributor: A. Sandoval
Brain Break Cards help keep students engaged during longer activities by giving them an activity break! These activities get students moving and energized in order to help them along when it is time to resume their tasks. Brain breaks are a great preventative tool to use to help keep your students alert and ready to learn!
The tool I have chosen is called Brain Breaks & Activity Cards. I recently have discovered that interactive transitions between course content and lessons is such a great tool to implement in your classroom. When students are sitting in their desks for too long, they get antsy and talkative. I have always been a strong believer that the best way students learn is by creating an active and entertaining environment. Using different activities (such as musical breaks, dance parties, Simon Says, or yoga stretches) allows students to get their jitterbugs out for a quick five minutes, so that hopefully during the lesson they will be less tempted to use inappropriate behavior.
This tool is related to the preventative phase. Using these brain breaks prevents inappropriate behavior in the classroom by allowing students to exhaust some of their energy out with fun and energetic activities. It is unrealistic to expect students to quietly sit in their desks all day long without any movement, apart from recess. Inappropriate behavior is much more likely to occur when your students have been sitting all day without any type of entertainment or movement. This tool definitely aligns with student centered and collaborative theories of influence. An educator who has a teacher centered influence would not care as much to use these fun and interactive activities. However, a teacher with a student centered influence I would do anything in their power to help their students' quality of learning and retaining information. The reason this is also on the cooperative side of the influence continuum I is that the teacher and the students must participate in these activities together. When the teacher models these activities for students, it shows the students that their teacher cares about making learning fun and interesting for them.
More Information –
Tool Source: Proud to be Primary
Brain Breaks & Activity Cards for Classroom Management
