What is brain breaks

What are Brain Breaks? - TeachHUB

Including brain research focused on enhancing brain function and brain-stimulating activities in lessons are imperative for effective learning in today’s classrooms. Students’ brains need to be stimulated to grow and learn. Including multiple types of brain breaks in your classrooms is necessary for maximum learning. There is a multitude of resources for teachers to incorporate appropriate brain breaks in the classroom, from online resources to simple games. Brain breaks in teaching boosts cognitive functioning and fosters the joy of learning.

What are Brain Breaks?

Brain breaks are an important part of learning. They are small mental breaks designed to help students focus and attend. They typically get students moving and allow blood and oxygen to flow to the brain. These breaks allow students a small reset in the day and enhance energy and relaxation. Research states that doubling students’ chronological age is comparable to their attention span. Too much, too fast, won’t last. Teachers’ goals are for students to retain information, and it is best to allow them time to think and process. Brain breaks are good for students at any age from Pre-K through college.

Brain breaks positively impact our emotional states. The hippocampus can only process so much information at once, and brain breaks allow students and teachers to reset for a few minutes. These breaks allow and develop creativity and social skills. A great example of this is allowing students to participate in a small dance break to music. This is such an effective way to allow students to break outside of their box and show their creativity. Sometimes the shy students in class may be afraid to speak up while answering questions, but will dance their heart out to music. It’s so fun and brings laughter to the classroom! Brain breaks should be considered an investment into the students’ and teachers’ day.

Benefits of Brain Breaks for Kids

Countless research supports incorporating brain breaks into teaching. The benefits include better behavior, increased productivity, enhanced comprehension, creative thinking, and increased time on task. They help students pay attention and are as important as the skills being taught. Teachers should structure their classes to where students are not focusing on one task too long and possibly becoming counterproductive. Brain breaks including music and movement positively stimulate their brains.

Brain breaks increase efficiency and performance in the classroom. They are valuable for students and teachers. Movement, music, and humor are all great ideas to incorporate into brain breaks. They reduce stress and frustration, and increase attention and productivity. Physical activity has so many benefits, and incorporating small bursts of these kinds of activities during lessons possess real advantages.

Brain Break Ideas and Activities to Try

Let the students know they are building up their brain power during these breaks, and plan brain breaks according to the age of the children you are working with. Schedule them into lessons, and set a timer to ensure they are implemented. Students need to engage in these breaks before they become distracted or tired. It is best to include a variety so all students can enjoy and look forward to them. Periodically allow students to decide what the brain break will be. An example would be to allow a student that has a birthday to choose the brain breaks for the day.

Teachers can also reinforce skills that are taught in class. This allows them to utilize different parts of their brains during the lesson. It is best to model the brain break and sometimes participate with students. The kids love to see the teacher in a different role. It is best to be flexible, and include opportunities to socialize and move. Incorporate games into learning, and brain breaks will be blended into the lesson.

Go Noodle is one of the most popular brain break websites, and students love it! There is a plethora of songs including reinforcing academic skills, stretches, and movement. These are free, short videos that help students engage in movement in the classroom.

Flocabulary is an online resource library full of songs and raps for classrooms K-12. The videos and activities present a myriad of skills in a rap song, and students can dance along. The songs are enjoyable and amusing. The Learning Station is another online resource that includes brain break videos for kids. The videos incorporate movement and dancing and are designed for young children.

Brain breaks can also include focusing attention practices to quiet the mind and many distractions in our day. They allow students to practice time outs and engage in think-time to process. Our thinking improves during this time and allows our emotions to regulate. This is when stretching poses such as those found in yoga are a perfect brain break. Examples of quieting the mind are turning the lights down and allowing students to sit or relocate to a quiet place in the room for just a few minutes. Another example would be to allow students to draw or work on a puzzle quietly for just a few minutes.

Brain breaks in teaching boost cognitive functioning and foster the joy of learning. Brain breaks should always be structured and planned according to what is going on in class. They are imperative in today’s classrooms, and allow teachers and students the opportunity for movement, quiet, and overall enjoyment.

Brain Break Ideas to Help Students Reset and Refocus

Imagine you’ve been working with your students on a difficult new concept. You’ve all been hard at work for around 15 minutes.

But as time goes by, you begin to spot the tell-tale signs: blank stares, wiggles and fidgeting, and sighs of frustration.

Your students are losing interest and focus by the minute.

How can you get your class back on track and ready to learn again? This is an important concept, but clearly you’ve all had enough, and recess is hours away.

Sounds like it might be time to try a brain break.

What Are Brain Breaks?

A “brain break” is an activity that takes you away from hard mental work and allows your brain and body to reset. Examples include:

Movement breaks, which are physical activities like stretches, yoga poses, jumping jacks, push-ups, or a quick dance party.
Mental breaks like deep breathing, mindfulness exercises, playing a game, or doing an art activity such as a printable coloring page.

These are meant to be quick and easy—a short break anywhere from three to five minutes can be enough to reset the mind and get students ready to learn.

Brain breaks, while often used for younger students, are useful for any age group (adults included!). When planning these breaks, a general rule to follow is that a three to five minute activity is appropriate for every 10 to 15 minutes of concentrated work time for elementary students, and every 20 to 30 minutes for middle and high school students.

Why Are Brain Breaks Important?

The brain is a powerful computer, and like any computer, it needs time to process. When we work intently on a project or focus on an activity, we need time to understand and synthesize that information. Just as you only have a certain amount of physical stamina to go for a run, you also have a limited amount of mental stamina to work on a project. Brain breaks are vital for helping our minds process what we’ve learned.

You might be wary to take time out of the day for a break, especially when students have so much material to learn. You may be concerned that a break would disrupt the entire class, and it would be hard to get students back on track.

However, many educators use brain breaks as a powerful classroom management tool. Research shows that brain breaks allow young minds to reset and recharge. They replenish the attention, motivation, and energy levels needed to keep learning. Students also learn better when lessons are broken up into smaller segments. This is especially true for younger children, whose attention spans are still developing.

Here are two brain break ideas from leading SEL organizations that you can use in your classroom to help your students refocus and be ready to learn.

1. Calm Breathing Techniques

2. Growth Mindset Musical Plates

Pro Tip: Through Panorama's Playbook, schools and districts that partner with Panorama can access research-backed lesson plans and interventions from leading social-emotional learning curriculum providers such as Open Circle, The Rooted School, and many others!

Brain Break Activities For the Classroom

Calm Breathing Techniques

Courtesy of Open Circle

Overview: Help students understand what it feels like to be calm and to learn and practice several breathing techniques to help them calm down.

Instructions for Implementation:

Invite students to think about what makes them feel calm and relaxed (e.g. listening to music, reading a book, lying down). Share with students the following breathing techniques that they can use when they want to feel calm.

Balloon Breathing: Sit in a relaxed, comfortable position. Breathe in slowly through your nose, filling your belly with air like a balloon. Breathe out slowly. Have students practice this technique a few times.
Flower Breathing: Breathe in through your nose, imagining the fragrance of a sweet-smelling flower. Breathe out with an “ahhh” sound. Have students practice this technique a few times.
Blowing Bubbles: Imagine that you have a jar of bubbles in front of you. Take off the lid. Dip the wand into the bubbles. Take a deep breath and fill your belly with air. Now take the wand out of the jar, breathe out very slowly in order to blow a large bubble, without popping it. Repeat these steps to blow more bubbles.

Ask students which technique they like best and suggest that they practice that method. Tell students that knowing and practicing calm-breathing techniques can help them be strong learners, helpful friends and successful problem-solvers.

Click here to access instructions for adapting this practice for virtual use/distance learning.

Join Jason Ernest Feldman, Professional Learning Manager at Panorama Education, in practicing Balloon Breathing:

Pro Tip: Deep, calm breathing sends oxygen throughout the body, and can be a helpful tool for resetting the brain when feeling stressed or overwhelmed. Create opportunities to practice breathing techniques and use them to help students during transitions or as a brain break.

Growth Mindset Musical Plates

Courtesy of The Rooted School

Overview: When faced with a frustrating challenge, it is a good idea to take a step back and make sure we are calm and ready to use our growth mindset skills. Sometimes we get “stuck” in our old mindset. Use this quick and easy physical brain break as a fun way to get students moving and help retrain brains for growth mindset thinking.

Supplies:

Paper plates
Something to write with

Instructions for Implementation:

Decorate the plates with positive self-talk phrases. Here are some ideas:

Challenges help my brain grow
Practice makes progress
I can’t do it...YET!
I can do hard things
This is tough, but so am I
I’m learning from this
I’m doing my best
My best is enough
Challenges make me stronger

Place plates face down on the floor or ground in a circle. Play some inspirational music and walk around until the music stops. When it stops, stand on the plate and read it out loud. How can you apply it to the current challenge?

Keep repeating walking with music until the frustration has subsided and the growth mindset has kicked in. Then, return to the challenge and use those growth mindset ideas from the plates to help you look at your challenge differently than you did before.

Download the facilitator guide for Growth Mindset Musical Plates

Pro Tip: This activity does require some preparation ahead of time, but once the plates are made, you can bring them out again and again to help your students develop a growth mindset. Decorating the plates can also be a creative brain break activity!

Explore more SEL resources for educators:

5 Social-Emotional Learning Activities for High School

6 Middle School SEL Activities to Support Growth and Transitions

SEL for Elementary Schoolers: 6 Everyday Activities for Your Classroom

Morning Meetings: Cultivating a Culture of Care and Safety

The Lunch Bunch: A Small-Group Intervention for Building Social Skills

101 Inclusive Get-To-Know-You Questions for Students

Download the toolkit: Small-Group SEL Facilitation Guides [6 Activities]

To learn faster, the brain constantly breaks its DNA / Sudo Null IT News

Double-strand DNA breaks are dangerous genetic damage, but they are very important in normal cellular processes

The brain responds to threats quickly. It not only forms new neural connections, but also breaks the DNA of its cells, and then recreates the genome, accelerating the expression of learning and memory genes.

The discovery allows us to understand the nature of brain plasticity and shows that DNA breakage is an important part of normal cellular processes. In addition, it forces scientists to change their attitude towards aging, disease and genomic events, which were usually explained as unfortunate coincidences. For details, we invite you under the cut, while our flagship Data Science course begins.

DNA double strand breaks (when both strands of the helical ladder break at the same location along the genome) are a dangerous form of genetic damage associated with cancer, neuronal degeneration, and aging. Which makes the discovery even more surprising: these breaks are more difficult for cells to repair than other DNA damage, because there is no whole “template” for reconnecting the strands.

The positive role of DNA breaks has been noted for a long time. By turning on certain genes, they are involved both in the development of neurons and in the process of genetic recombination of chromosomes during cell division, allowing DNA fragments to recombine and generate a diverse spectrum of antibodies in the developing immune system. Previously, these were all considered exceptions to the rule that double-strand breaks were random and undesirable.

The turning point came in 2015, when a team led by Li-Hui Tsai investigated the accumulation of double-strand breaks in neurons associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Study participants were surprised by the fact that stimulation of cultured neurons caused double-strand breaks in their DNA, which immediately increased the expression of dozens of fast-acting genes that affect synaptic activity in learning and memory.

Double-strand breaks seem to regulate the activity of genes important for the functioning of neurons. The scientists hypothesized that the breaks release enzymes that get stuck along twisted DNA fragments to rapidly transcribe nearby genes. But the idea was met with great skepticism.

“It's just hard for people to imagine that double-strand breaks can be physiologically important,” says Li-Hui Tsai.

These findings were further developed in a study led by University of Queensland postdoctoral fellow Paul Marshall. This study showed that a DNA break caused two waves of enhanced transcription of the genes: the first immediately, the second a few hours later.

As an explanation, scientists proposed a two-stage mechanism: when DNA breaks, enzyme molecules are released for transcription, and the break site is marked with an epigenetic marker — a methyl group. At the beginning of the repair of damaged DNA, this label is removed - the second round of transcription begins, where even more enzymes are released.

According to Marshall, the double-strand break here is not only a trigger. Later, it becomes a regulatory marker that guides the mechanisms to the place of the break. Further studies demonstrated something similar:

In one of them, double-strand breaks were associated not only with the formation of memory of fear, but also with its very memory.
In another study, Tsai and colleagues showed that this controversial gene expression mechanism may be common in the brain.

In a new study published July 1 in PLOS ONE, instead of cultured neurons, the team led by Li-Hui Tsai studied the brain cells of live mice that had received an electric shock.

When scientists located the genes that had undergone double-strand breaks in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus of shocked mice, they found breaks in about a hundred genes. Many of them are involved in synaptic processes associated with memory.

It is also interesting that double-strand breaks were also found in neurons of non-shocked mice. According to Timothy Jerome (who was not involved in the study, but who worked in a related field), such breaks in the brain are completely normal. That is, the DNA of the brain is constantly being torn apart - this is amazing.

To confirm the conclusion, the scientists observed double-strand breaks in glia - non-neuronal brain cells involved in the regulation of various genes - and became convinced that glia are involved in the formation and storage of memories, and DNA breakage can be a regulatory mechanism in many other cell types wider than previously thought.

But even if important gene expression for memory consolidation or other cellular functions is quickly induced with DNA destruction, this is risky. If double strand breaks occur in the same places without proper repair, genetic information is lost. This type of gene regulation makes neurons vulnerable to genome damage, especially during aging and under neurotoxic conditions, Tsai says.

Bruce Yankner, a neuroscientist and geneticist at Harvard Medical School, is interested in the fact that such intense ruptures do not lead to devastating damage to brain cells.

The recovery process seems to be effective, but the effectiveness may decrease with age. Scientists are investigating the possibility of the mechanism of ruptures turning into a mechanism for neuronal degeneration in conditions, for example, Alzheimer's disease, as well as the influence of the mechanism on the development of glial tumors and post-traumatic stress.

If double-strand breaks regulate the activity of genes in cells outside the nervous system, disruption of the mechanism could lead to muscle atrophy or heart disease.

As the nuances of the rupture mechanism are discovered, new therapeutic methods will be developed to treat related diseases. Given the importance of double-thread breaks in core memory processes, trying to prevent such breaks can be a mistake.

With this new discovery, it becomes necessary to think of the genome as a dynamic system. After a break, the [DNA] pattern changes - and according to Paul Marshall, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Marshall's group began to investigate other types of DNA changes associated with deregulation and negative outcomes, including cancer. According to him, it is difficult for many to consider DNA breakage as a fundamental mechanism for the regulation of gene transcription, researchers see this process rather as DNA damage. However, the new discovery and the results of Tsai's work pave the way for deeper research.

While the brain breaks its own DNA for learning, you can learn how to solve business problems with the help of Data Science and Machine Learning:

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Speaking in Russian.

Breaking the brain of foreigners

Alexander San Francisco

Author:

Alexander San Francisco

November 15, 2014 03:08

Tags: People Are Awesome fun

15210

• Peace enforcement.
• Children's plastic railway.
• Fresh canned food.
• Illegal gangs.
• Eau de Toilette.
• Middle ear.
• Cold boiling water.
• McDonald's restaurant.
• Old New Year.
• Dry wine.
• Peacekeeping troops.
• True truth.
• Yes, no, probably.
• Probably for sure.
• Milk tooth
• Two degrees of heat.
• Begin to run out.
• Wooden double-glazed window.
• Dead hour!
• Patient has severe weakness
• SMS—message.
• Kill to death.
• I'm going to go to the store.
• Loose stools.
• Make the fire quieter!
• Maximum allowable rate.
And also, an attraction - be scared to death.
Well, bye, come on!
hang noodles on your ears; lead by the nose; You can't, but if you really want to, you can. And the universal word is crap.
The Russian language is very short and concise. For example, the inscription "There were tourists from Russia here" consists of only three letters...
***
Only a Russian person can say to a cat: "Oh, you are my bunny!"
***
It is difficult to explain to a foreigner the phrase "Hands do not reach to see."
***
In the phrases "we are on you" and "we are married" the same set and order of letters. And what a different meaning!
***
Foreigners will never understand how it is possible to peel a turnip for two horseradish, or slap a pumpkin on one pepper.
***
The Russian language is expressive and rich. But already it was not enough.
***
Depending on the intonation, one swear word of a car mechanic Ivanov can mean up to 70 different parts and devices.
***
We explain to a foreigner the phrase - "in a mowing with dew, a bare scythe with a scythe scythe mowed a slope"
1) oblique - drunk,
2) oblique - suffered from strabismus,
3) with a braid - hairstyle
4) oblique - curved braid,
5) oblique - in the hands of a braid
***
Another language "explosion" for a foreigner: - Have a drink? - There is a drink, there is no.
***
The basic rule of the Russian language. If you are in doubt about how to write "here" or "here" - write "here".
***
It is only in Russia that "uh-huh" means "thank you", "oh!" is translated as "sorry!", and a piece of bread is the second cutlery...
***
It turns out that in a number of cases, the meaning of what is written changes significantly from replacing the letter E with E. For example, "drank everything" or "drank everything"...
***
A complete sentence of five verbs without punctuation marks and conjunctions: "We decided to send to go buy a drink."

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