Brain breaks are wonderful, and they’re best when they’re quick and easy. Using nothing more than a handful of dice and a free printable, I’ve got 30 quick and easy brain breaks you can do with absolutely no prep.
Why Use Brain Breaks?
If you read what I wrote about the reticular activating system, you know that micro changes in the environment can keep the grey matter on high alert, which is what we want, right?
We want to constantly keep our students’ minds refreshed, and if we are learning for any length of time, it’s great to break that learning up with short breaks, the more kinesthetic the better.
Using Dice for Brain Breaks
Print out this free printable sheet, grab a handful of dice, and roll your way to easy brain breaks.
This sheet assumes you have five colors of dice (one each color: red, white, yellow, green and blue).
Distribute the dice. Randomly throughout the class period, ask the student who has the die to roll it (start with the red and work right across the sheet through the colors for ease in keeping track and avoiding redundancy).
Skim down the column until your get to the number the student rolled, and then have the class do the corresponding brain break activity. All of them are mini-sized and easy.
You can have the same student keep that die the entire class period or give it to someone else.
Repeat.
There are thirty possible brain breaks on this one little sheet!
I like to use larger-sized dice, but that’s just a personal preference.
