‘Active Break Every Day Challenge’ – November/December 2020

Active breaks in the classroom/Rainy Day breaks

In general, for wet/rainy days the children all have to stay in their classrooms, however, this doesn’t stop us being active!! Once lunch is eaten, lots of teachers like to perform exercises from ‘Go Noodle’ or take part in some calming meditation and stretches! The children love this, particularly the younger classes in the school! Some teachers like to use ‘Go Noodle’ in between lessons too to act as an active break for students who are finding it hard to focus! This is another reason why we couldn’t wait to tackle the ‘Active Break Every Day Challenge!!’

During the months of November and December 2020, every class in the school completed the ‘Active Break Every Day Challenge’ as part of the Active Schools initiative. Initially we intended to do it over a period of 4 weeks however, we enjoyed it so much that we decided to continue our Active Break Challenge every day right up until our Christmas holidays!

This initiative involved every class completing the SAME activity, either indoors or outdoors, on any particular day and displaying & ticking off our ACTIVE BREAKS CHALLENGE charts (see photo below).

The following was the layout of activities:

GoNoodle MONDAYS: Every class completed an activity on the GoNoodle website https://www.gonoodle.com/ This resource engaged children in various different movement/ mindfulness videos and fuelled their learning by getting kids focused and ready to learn.

Running TUESDAYS: Every class ran laps either around the basketball court or football pitch for a few minutes every Tuesday! Running is one of the simplest and most effective ways of improving fitness with absolutely no equipment needed!

10 @ 10 WEDNESDAYS: Every class logged on to the 10@10 RTE website https://rtejr.rte.ie/10at10/ and completed one of the many episodes in order to get active, all the while having lots of fun!! Similarly to the GoNoodle, these could have been completed within the classroom so it didn’t matter what the weather was like outside!!

Bizzy Breaks THURSDAYS ‘Bizzy Breaks’ is a collection of activities for primary school pupils designed to support children to move throughout the day, using minimal equipment! The teachers displayed their ‘Bizzy Breaks’ poster provided, somewhere in their classroom and chose one of the ‘looseners’ ‘huffers’ and/or ‘stretchers’ activities to complete on Thursdays!! Needless to say they were kept ‘Bizzy’!!

Skipping FRIDAYS Every class recalled some of the great skipping techniques and challenges that we learned back when we completed the ‘Climb the Heights’ skipping challenge in 2019 as well as the ‘Skip n Rope’ workshop conducted by Mark McCabe. The skipping ropes were set up by the senior classes on the basketball court on Friday mornings. It was very important that all students sanitised before and after using the ropes, which were sanitised after school every Friday evening.

The Active Break Every Day Challenge certainly wasn’t too much of a ‘challenge’ for our students, who enjoyed every single activity assigned to them!! Take a closer look at the photos below!