20 Day Blogging Challenge, Day 10: Share ideas that your classroom uses for brain breaks and/or indoor recess. (I skipped Day 9, but I will come back to it soon.)
Last week was an entire week of inside recess. I was hoping the kids would be able to get outside on Friday, but it didn't get as warm as the forecast predicted, and we had freezing rain which turned our playground into an ice skating rink. Top that off with no specials on Friday, so we took a brain break and got out the jigsaw puzzles. It fit with our math as well, since we are working on geometry. Solving jigsaw puzzles is a great time to talk about flips, turns and slides.
My puzzle collection is made up of inexpensive hundred piece puzzles. It's always interesting to see which kids have experience with solving jigsaw puzzles. We talk about possible problem solving strategies, like sorting according to color, finding the outside edge first, using the photo on the box to identify key parts of the picture. Then we work in teams to solve our puzzles.
Some groups had each member work on one section of the puzzle and then they put the sections together. That worked well for the Sponge Bob group. Poor Patrick Star is missing a piece, as are many of my puzzles.
This time I let the kids pick their puzzle and pick their partners. It's relaxing, fun, and we are still learning.
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