Do you do brain breaks in the classroom? Most brain breaks give your students a chance to get up and move for a few minutes before returning back to your lesson. It’s nice to have a variety of brain breaks that you can just grab and go! One super easy way to create accessible brain breaks in the classroom, is to write some activities down on popsicle sticks. After you do that brain break, you can simply turn the popsicle stick upside down. Then next time, grab one of the activities that you haven’t done yet to make sure you are giving your students a variety of options. It’s nice to have brain breaks everywhere in the room so they are ready to go wherever you’re teaching and feel your kids need a break. You can use many of the same brain breaks you used with your popsicle sticks, but make them portable too.

Put some cards on a ring and hang them on your whiteboard, by your door, desk, etc. If you need a set of cards for your classroom, I created these Brain Break cards, which are also EDITABLE!

There are 30 brain break activities with directions included of how to do each activity. You can print the cards double sided, so even a substitute will know how to use these. I included an editable slide, so you can make up your own brain breaks! Some of the activities are games, songs, stretches, movements, etc. to give your students a chance to get their wiggles out!

One of my favorite brain breaks in the classroom are my Fluency & Fitness® activities. They are an engaging whole group activity where your students can get in some exercise, but also continue to work on essential reading and math skills. Students have so much fun with these, that they don’t even realize they’re learning.

I have over 70 Fluency & Fitness® sets for grade PreK – 5th grade including everything from letters, sight words, numbers, phonics skills, addition, and more math facts all the way up to division. Here’s a peek at what Fluency & Fitness® looks like in action.

To get more use out of Fluency & Fitness® you can print the slides (I did 6 slides per page), and then cut them up  into flashcards. Throw them in a container for another grab and go brain break. 

If you’re working on addition to 10 for the week, you can review the math facts with these flash cards, but surprise them with a brain break too! Your students could even play this in their literacy or math centers.

UPDATE: Due to the popularity of my Fluency & Fitness, I now have a subscription website where you can get easy, online access to over 60 topics and 900 videos for K-2!

There are new features exclusive to the website such as double the number of exercises, animated exercise kids, music, timers and more NOW included! (Fluency & Fitness has now been turned into videos, so you don’t have to control the game anymore, but this does mean that the slides are no longer printable.)

Here’s a peek at the NEW Fluency & Fitness with the new, fun features! 🙂

You can find my Brain Break Cards and Fluency & Fitness® sets in my TPT store as well.