Brain breaks for your online classroom

 Brain Breaks for your online classroom:

Photo by Fakurian Design on Unsplash 

Since starting to teach entirely online last year, at the start of the pandemic, I’ve made many changes to the content and structure of my lessons. Many of these changes have been through necessity. I’ve been thinking recently which  of these new ideas have been most successful and which of them would be a useful addition to add to my face to face lessons, when these eventually resume.

One of the ideas I experimented with for the first time in online teaching is ‘ Brain Breaks’. If you’re already familiar with brain breaks, I’m sure that you are just as much a fan of them as I am. If you have yet to try brain breaks here is a link to find out all about the theory. What Is a Brain Break? (thoughtco.com)

Brain breaks are especially effective for the online situation, as attention spans are short and lessons should be broken down into more bite-sized chunks. To keep their attention, the students should be continually actively involved and participating. The lessons should be fast paced and too much content should be avoided. If, like me, you were suddenly faced with the necessity of moving all your existing face to face classes online, you will have probably struggled with the length of the lessons. Online lessons should be shorter in duration. Our classes were three hours in duration and this was clearly going to be problematic online.

This is when I started to do some research into the effectiveness of brain breaks for refocusing and revitalizing students of all ages and levels.

I also found out that in addition to simply taking a break from the screen that there were particular benefits from taking a short break that included some sort of physical movement. In particular the vestibular system if activated will help to support attention, focus and eye movement. The vestibular system is located in the inner ear and receives signals when the head moves. It helps with such things as balance, muscle tone, posture, orientation in space and alertness.

Obviously it can be a major challenge to try and incorporate very much physical movement into an online class. That’s why I think the importance should not be underestimated.

I’ve been experimenting with various kinds of brain breaks and adapting some of these to the online situation.

Whether you are teaching face to face or online, there are many great websites and resources which are aimed at both adult and younger learners. Some of my favorite ones, which are suitable for both formats are:  5 GoNoodle Videos Perfect for Getting the Wiggles Out - GoNoodle

I also like:  Using fitFlow at Home | Sanford Fit (sanfordhealth.org)

Another one which has great ideas is:

PE, Active Learning, Mental Wellbeing resources for Primary Schools | imoves

As I mentioned before, when teaching online some activities might not be so suitable. However many traditional ways of taking  a break from learning that involve physical movement can be quite easily adapted.

There is no reason why the students need to sit at their screen for the entire length of the lesson. Get them up and active and moving around the space that is available to them at home. Things I have successfully tried out with adult learners are: asking them to go and get certain items from their kitchen or another room (This has the added advantage of building up vocabulary in a meaningful way);  giving them different actions that they have to act out, such as riding a bike, climbing a mountain, watching a game of tennis etc.; playing a quick game of Simon Says.

If you want to investigate brain breaks that are specifically designed for Zoom, a really useful resource that is free to download is: Brain Breaks: Zoom Edition – Institute of Positive Education

I highly recommend it, and each of the activities takes just about three minutes and requires no special preparation at all. I will describe three of the activities that I have found most useful so far.

1)      What do you look like when…?  In this activity the students are told to turn away from their screens. The teacher asks them to prepare a facial expression for a series of prompts. For example, What do you look like when it’s Friday afternoon?/ What do you look like when you have forgotten to do your homework? etc. The teacher then says something like ,’Three, two, one turn round and show your face.’ There’s usually a lot of laughter and no embarrassment at all.

2)      One, two, three, again! This involves all the students standing up. One student is instructed to start and say number one. The objective is for the class to work together and count up to ten by different students saying each number in sequence and sitting down. However, if two students shout out the next number at the same time as each other, then they have to start over from the beginning again. Its good for building team work too.

3)      Air Karaoke  I really love this one. It is ideal for shy students or those who do not like the sound of their voice being broadcast to everyone. In this brain break the teacher chooses a lively  and fun song and shares the sound . The students are all on mute and they have to sing, mime and dance along with the tune. This actually works well with all ages, as I found out!

After having a lot of success with my brain breaks in the online classes, I am determined to continue using them in the future. Very often face to face classes are not well split up and the students can lose motivation in the course of long exercises or activities that follow directly on from each other without any change in pace. I’ve found that when used, brain breaks just take up a very short amount of time , but really add something to the atmosphere in the class and prevent students from switching off and falling asleep or starting to lose focus. If you haven’t experimented with brain breaks yet, why don’t you try some of my recommendations here to get you started?

I'd love to hear about any brain breaks that you have found successful!