Brain Breaks for Cognitive Wellbeing
Brain breaks are short physical and mental activities which generate positive effects on students’ learning, since they:
enhance students’ engagement and cognitive functioning.
support the cognitive maturity.
enhance students’ mood, focus and competence.
strengthen teacher-student relationship.
The benefit of colouring and arts as brain breaks:
It is good for children’s mental health, since it makes children release stress and helps their body to stay calm and relax.
It promotes mindfulness, which enables children’s focus and helps them to stay in the moment.
It helps children to embrace the imperfectness, because there is no judgement nor expectations for enjoying the beauty of colouring.
The benefit of playing puzzles:
It helps children develop their finger strength, perseverance and problem-solving skills.
It encourages children to look at a whole picture more carefully, going over them from top to bottom and from left to right. Through doing this, children will notice the visual similarities and differences, and discover the small details which they have not noticed before.
It develops children’s memory skills, as well as their ability to plan, test ideas and solve problems. While completing a puzzle, children need to remember shapes, colours, positions and strategies to complete them.
It helps the children to learn to accept the challenges, overcome problems and deal with frustrations in positive ways.
