Have you utilized brain breaks in your classroom? Brain breaks help reset energy levels, boost student focus, and enhance the feeling of community among students. In addition to providing a break from instruction, brain breaks help improve retention and increase the active participation of your students while learning.
In this blog post, we will define what brain breaks are, discuss why they might benefit your group, and suggest ways to incorporate them into your routine.
What is a Brain Break?
A brain break refers to short periods of mental and physical disengagement from academic tasks to help students regain focus and energy. These periods allow students to reduce the intensity of their cognitive activity and follow a more light-hearted, creative or active course of thinking.
Brain breaks in the classroom can be beneficial because they allow students to stop working on challenging lessons and give them an opportunity for reduced frustration and increased motivation.
Classroom Brain Break Strategies
When considering how to incorporate “brain breaks” into your instruction, consider your students’ age, learning styles and interests. The following strategies and resources are available for all of you to add in neuro-products to your classroom experience. Additionally, I added an AI resource at the end of my post!
Engaging Prompts
Thought-provoking prompts can be a great way to incorporate writing or discussion-based brain breaks. Khan Academy Refresh provides excellent short prompts that can work across multiple grade levels. You can have students respond with an illustration, a short list, or a brief conversation to spark creativity and engagement.
Coloring Book Pages
This year, I’ve shared lots of content related to artificial intelligence on the blog and podcast. The topic of AI and how to generate supplemental resources with AI has been a big focus of my professional learning work, too. One thing I love to share that you can also use as a brain break is coloring book pages.
In my blog post, “How to Make Your Own Coloring Book Pages with AI,” I share step-by-step strategies for making coloring book pages with popular tools like Adobe Firefly and Canva’s Magic Media tool.
Story Starters
Scholastic Story Starters is a fantastic tool for quick, fun writing prompts. Students can spin a digital wheel to generate an imaginative scenario and then write a few sentences or a short paragraph. You can also turn this into a Think-Pair-Share activity where students build off each other’s stories.
Another place to go for quick prompts is a chatbot. You tell a chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini a little bit about your group (ex., Grade level) and ask it to give you ideas for story starters you can share with them.
Trivia Questions
Using platforms like Kahoot! for trivia challenges can energize students while reinforcing classroom learning. You can find pre-made trivia quizzes on a wide range of subjects or create custom quizzes tailored to your students’ interests and curriculum.
Wonder of the Day
Wonderopolis was a teacher favorite that provided a daily “Wonder of the Day” prompt, which encourages curiosity and discussion. Although this tool is no longer available, you can ask a chatbot for help replicating these. For example, you might use a prompt like, “Make a list of 5 things that will make 4th grade students wonder about the world around them.” These prompts work well as brain breaks or as discussion starters for classroom debates and research-based activities.
Quick Questions
Students can engage in fun, quick activities using interactive Polling Tools such as Mentimeter or Poll Everywhere; they can participate by voting on various issues. For example, students may be asked to choose between two options in a “this or that” style format or vote for which side they would take in some kind of funny debate. You can create a Word Wall using Mentimeter. Creating a word wall with Mentimeter is one of my favorite student projects, so that is something I would strongly recommend.
Using a Chatbot for Classroom Brain Break Ideas
If you are interested in developing new ways for your students to take a short break during class, chatbots can help you create more personalized ideas based on what you are teaching. To get ideas to fit your particular classroom, you can provide a specific prompt for the chatbot, and it will quickly return ideas that meet the needs of your classroom. One example of a customizable prompt is:
“I am a third-grade teacher, and I would like to develop new team-building brain break activities for my class that focus on collaboration.”
For a third-grade class working on collaboration, the chatbot could provide many ideas, including cooperative games, games played with partners, and role-play exercises. Use several different prompts to find additional new ways to engage your students’ minds.
