How Brain Breaks Improve Your Homeschool Day

Movement provides a nice break from the mental challenges of the school day. PeopleImages.com - Yuri A/Shutterstock

The brain is an amazing, hard-working organ. Even while your kids are sleeping, their brains continue to busily process all of the experiences from the day, store essential information, and categorize and weed out the unimportant. It’s on duty 24/7.

The brain does need quality rest, though. Enter brain breaks. Adding in a brain break for about three to five minutes in between lessons throughout your homeschooling day will help your kids—and their brains—to rest and reset for optimal learning.

What Is a Brain Break?

Simply put, a brain break is a pause in learning.

The purpose of a brain break is to give your kids time to recharge both their brains and their bodies with activities that energize or calm; these breaks allow their brains time to process and reinforce learning.

Leonardo Cohen, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, studied the neural activity in the brain (the communication network between all of the nerve cells in the brain) during a break from learning. Participants in Cohen’s study learned how to type with their nondominant hand; during a break from participants’ typing, his team then scanned their brains and found that the neural activity was extraordinarily active.

Known as neural replay, the participants’ brains were repeatedly replaying what they had just learned and then converting that information into long-term memory.

Different Types of Brain Breaks

Brain breaks can be a form of movement, sensory stimulation, mindfulness activities, or a creative project. Choose movement activities such as calisthenics or dancing to upbeat or favorite music, or challenge your kids to a game of keep the balloon in the air. If it’s pleasant outside, encourage them to go out and play tag, climb trees, jump rope, roller skate, or work in the garden hoeing, weeding, or harvesting.

Some sensory activities that are easy to incorporate into your day include Play-Doh play, especially with the homemade scented kind, water and sand play, nature walks, bubble blowing, etc. Try some practical life skills, too, such as washing dishes, folding fresh laundry, collecting eggs from the hen house, or picking sweet-smelling, colorful flowers for a dinnertime centerpiece.

Mindfulness and relaxing activity breaks help to soothe your kids if they’re struggling or frustrated during a lesson. For example, guided meditation exercises work wonders as brain breaks. Visit the Green Child Magazine website for an introduction to the wonderful world of guided meditation and its benefits, and download 60 free guided imagery scripts to use with your kids. Or put on some serene classical music, such as Edvard Grieg’s “Morning Mood” or “The Swan” by Camille Saint-Saëns, and let your kids’ minds float along with the melodies.

A creative brain break gives your kids the opportunity to spend a few minutes on a project, such as knitting, crocheting, sewing, painting, designing greeting cards, or making jewelry.

When and How to Incorporate Brain Breaks

Charlotte Mason, esteemed British educator, believed that lessons should be short to best take advantage of a student’s attention span; she recommends 20-minute lessons for young children and 40-minute lessons for older students. Her philosophy is based on two considerations. First, a child who knows how much time he or she has to complete a lesson tends to focus better with less daydreaming. Second, when this is implemented on a daily basis, a child’s attention span will naturally, over time, strengthen and improve. So with this in mind, plan for a brain break after each lesson.

Also, any time that you notice your child fidgeting, daydreaming, or struggling, it’s the perfect time to break away from the lesson with a brain break.

During our homeschooling years, I created a fitness jar that was full of slips of paper with different movement activities written on them. Throughout the day, whenever our kids needed to move around, they’d reach in, grab one, and follow the instructions. This got me thinking: A brain break jar could work the same way. Brainstorm with your kids to come up with ideas for each type of brain break or, if you need a little inspiration, visit the Rock Your Homeschool website to download a free printable list of 54 brain break ideas.

So, incorporating brain breaks into your homeschooling day will positively enhance your program in several ways: Your kids will be more motivated to focus and work diligently to complete their lessons, they will retain more information and have stronger recall, and they will hopefully look forward to each new school day because they will experience fewer frustrations and struggles in the learning process.