What do you get when you give a group of students an Ipad or a cell phone and a challenge? Amazing videos! The Lutheran Schools Partnership sponsored a Brain Break Video Contest for our schools to celebrate National Lutheran Schools Week. Many of our schools use websites like www.GoNoodle.com to provide “brain breaks” for students during the school day. To celebrate National Lutheran Schools Week and to celebrate what makes us unique, we challenged our schools to create brain breaks that show who we are, and that we could use in our TLSP schools.
Brain breaks are short, active times in the classroom that allow students to get out of their seats, get their bodies moving, and get their brains ready to learn more. Having videos that students can follow along with for these brain breaks is fun for students and helpful for teachers. In a previous article, Keeping the Brain In Mind, I referenced the research on cross-lateral exercises, and their importance for children. We encouraged our brain break video creators to include those types of exercises in their 1-3 minute videos. In all, eighteen brain break videos were submitted by six of our TLSP schools. Some videos were put together by classes of students with teacher leadership, and some were created by small groups of students working almost independent of teacher help. It is a true reflection of the excellence of our schools to see the creative, funny, and useful videos created by our students that also share the Gospel message. A committee of four TLSP teachers judged the videos using guidelines that had been shared with schools when they were invited to enter the contest. Honorable mention awards went to St. Peter’s sixth grade for their “Lit” brain break, Ascension Kindergarten and first grade for their “Can’t Stop the Praising” video, and St. Paul’s first and second grade for their “JESUS” video. Each of these schools received a Meijer gift card. First place in the Brain Break Video Contest was awarded to Mr. Buuck’s third grade at Emmanuel-St. Michael Lutheran School for their video, It’s All About Jesus. Their class received a Visa gift card.The eighteen videos created for the contest are located on a Google Team Drive to which only teachers in TLSP have access. Teachers can now use the video brain breaks in all their classrooms, sharing the talents and imaginations of our schools with one another.
