GoNoodle is one of my new favoritest (that's an acceptable word in Kindergarten by the way) things ever! It is a free website that has a database of a wide variety of brain breaks for you to use with students. My students are LOVING GoNoodle and anything that can get my kiddos moving is a keeper in my book!
I'm a big fan of having scheduled brain/movement breaks in the classroom. It is one of the simplest, yet most effective, classroom management techniques I have ever used. It may be non-conventional, but I'm telling you it is worth stepping outside of the box for. Before GoNoodle every week I would pick a Just Dance Kids video. My students watch it 1 time on Mondays and then we start dancing! For the entire week I use the same video anytime we need a movement break in addition to dancing to it before our big literacy & math block. Having the scheduled times is helpful for them to know when they can move (plus it can provide some help with transitions) Most of my students love the dance and it is something that I highly recommend! Check out Matt Gomez's Just Dance Symbaloo page for some of the great classroom dance videos that I use. Even though it is a ton of fun some students are very hesitant to dance as some of the moves can be complicated. But with GoNoodle even my most reluctant dancers (which are oddly enough usually the ones that need to move the most) are participating!
So far our favorite GoNoodle activities include:
Champ Training. In this video you decide how long to exercise for (2-10 min) and you answer a series of health questions based on your grade level. If you get a correct answer you get a new movement card with some fun fitness moves. Health standards + movement = kids learning without even realizing it!
Yoga Moves with Maximo. I like to end each of our GoNoodle sessions with these short but effective yoga videos. Simple and age appropriate, they really engage my students & help them calm their bodies. Plus Maximo, the blue guy on the screen, is actually quite funny!
KidzBop songs. As I mentioned we already do a dance a week. But I like that GoNoodle has some very popular songs from KidzBop that my students can free dance to. I say 'free dance' as the choreography is too complicated on most videos for my students to mimic. Plus the videos are created music video style like so not as conducive to learning the steps.
Overall I'm glad I checked out GoNoodle, even though I had felt like I had enough movement activities scheduled in my day. Because let's be honest & say that you can never really have enough movement in Kindergarten can you?! Let me know in the comments of any of your favorite GoNoodle videos! Just this week we discovered DiscoBrain-a 2 minute video that has cartoon brains dancing disco style. Who would've thought my kids would FLIP for that like they have! So fun!!!! To quote one of my favorite dance enthusiasts, Ellen Degeneres, 'dance every day and be kind to one another!'
0 comments:
Post a Comment