Building blocks for activity breaks

Key Points

This strategy is for you as a teacher to understand about activity and learning and consider when and how you can include more activity and movement into your class’s week. It is about getting the whole class moving more as part of the normal school day

How is this tweaked for flex?

This strategy is to help formalise your understanding of why activity breaks are so important for the children flex is designed for, and to ensure that you are able to maintain this over time as the benefits of activity are often short-lived. It contains up-to-date scientific evidence to improve understanding

Plan

Understand why and how children need movement and activity breaks by watching the short video on moving and learning

Review your timetable for the week and lesson plans, and identify when you can build in opportunities for children to move around, using the planning template
We have some ideas for longer and shorter movement breaks
Decide how you will remember to make these happen! Will you use a timer, a colourful dot on your lesson planner, or something else? We have made some time to move icons you can use.

Review

At the end of each day (or start of the next day), note down how many times you had the class move around, and compare this with how many you planned using the sticking to plans template
Did it make any changes to your students? How about to your plans for the day?
Discuss with your SENCo or colleagues:
- What went well? Why do you think that was?
- What didn’t go well? How could you change that?

After doing this for a week, have a look at your sticking to plans template.
Use the reflection template to note whether there are any patterns, times or situations where you struggle to incorporate activity, times or situations where you fitted in extra activity.
Consider what could be done to make movement breaks more consistent and add these to your time to move planning template

Resources