Brain break activities are an essential way to keep students in your classroom focused on the content in front of them. Today, I am going to share some creative brain break ideas that have always proved to be the most popular brain break movement activities in my classroom. The kids BEG to play these quick games and they keep their brains energized and ready to learn!

Brain Break Activities List

Quiet Ball

My students BEG for this brain break activity. You just need a ball of any sort. Stand in a circle around your classroom. Students pass the ball around to each other. They get out of the game if they talk, laugh, drop the ball, or throw a ball that is uncatchable. Last one standing wins! It takes 1 minute, but it gets kids up and moving while also having a good time.

Minute to Win It

You can do basically ANY minute to win it game. I loved this post that has great ideas for school. But I have been known to say things like “whoever can do the most push ups in a minute wins”.

Group It

This brain break activity is so simple and takes no time at all. Give the whole class a category and then have them figure it out and time how long it takes! For example: Get in a group from the oldest student to the youngest in under 1 minute.

Other group ideas: tallest to shortest, who lives the farthest from the school to the closest, get in groups with people that ate a similar breakfast as you today, etc.

Four Corners

Another favorite brain break activity for students! Give each corner of your room a number. You close your eyes and count to 10 while everyone moves to a corner. Then, you call out a number. Anyone that is in that corner is out. Then, you keep repeating until there is one person left.

Meditation/Yoga

Mediation and yoga can be amazing brain breaks for your students and you’d be surprised how much they LOVE them! Here is my favorite yoga channel and my favorite mediation channel in the classroom. The best part is while your students are participating in these brain break activities you can either get some yoga done yourself or you can get all those quick teacher tasks done before the next lesson!

Musical Chairs

This is my FAVORITE type of brain break in the classroom and I love to use it when doing a worksheet or other form of sedentary work.

Here is how it goes: have students do one or two questions on their paper and then start playing music while the students walk around dancing. When the music stops, the students stop and sit down at a chair. Then, they do the next two problems on the paper! This is a great way to get through a review worksheet while also keeping them moving throughout the classroom!

Do you want more ways to make a worksheet fun? Head to this blog post!