I went to the Successful Teaching teacher blog and read a very interesting article entitled "Brain Breaks."
As a teacher and student myself I was drawn to this. I have never been one to lecture on endlessly but I still find my students dragging at times. This article gave me some helpful ideas.
There were ten main ideas listed but I will list and give a brief review of the ideas that most appealed to me below.
#3 " Pick a current events issue that is a hot topic in the news and discuss it."
While this might perhaps work better with certain other subjects, I believe this could work well in a mathematics classroom. Discussing the mathematical underpinnings of economical collaspe or prosperity could be engaging and a useful. In addition one of my SPI's (state performance indicatiors) is to teach my students about misleading graphs. These are quite often used to influence public opinion about current events. Showing students examples of these and fostering discussion about them would be a great brain break but also great for my instruction.
#10 "Play Bingo."
I have done this in my class before but reading this article made me decide to incorporate it more. Instead of giving students another boring worksheet you can challenge them with a game of bingo. An example would be the following Have students create a board of numbers. They can pick anything between -20 and 20. The teacher then puts and equation on the board, e.g., 2x + 3 = 12. The students will then solve the equation (x = 3) and if they have a 3 on their board they get to cross that box out. Its a ton of fun and gets students excited about doing math.
