Hey everyone! Have you heard of GoNoodle? All I can say is it is absolutely terrific! I think I saw a blog post by another teacher about GoNoodle a few months ago and was curious, so I clicked on over to see what it was all about. It is a website where you can sign up for free as a classroom teacher and you and your class get to do TONS of fabulous brain breaks. There is a wide variety – relaxing, breathing, dancing, stretching, ones where Olympic athletes train you for events like the shotput and discus, links to Zumba and many many more videos! As we know from brain research physical activity is enormously important to helping children process information and it does really make a difference in their learning. Well, all the GoNoodle activity helps your “noodle” get working! GoNoodle….activate !
Before you get into doing GoNoodle with your class they give you a demo class to work on. It is great because you can see quickly and easily how it works and watch all the brain breaks to see which ones would work best for your class.
One of the best things about it is you get to choose a class mascot! There are quite a few choices. For my demo class I chose Freckles and my first class mascot was Tangy Bodangy. Once you do enough brain breaks and accumulate minutes you get to choose a new mascot. Every 20 minutes or so of brain breaks you do gets your class to a new level, and with each new level your mascot goes to the transmogrifier and gets taller, and muscular and all kinds of crazy things happen ! See the 2nd and 3rd images below!
Here is one of the home screens. Each time you go there, your mascot has something silly to say. On the right it tracks how far you have gone in the level, how many minutes of brain breaks your class has done total, and how many minutes to the next level. My students sometimes beg to just to one more activity so we can get to the next level.
Here are examples of what a couple of mascots look like as you earn minutes and go through levels. Silly fun!
The activities we do most often in my class are Airtime, To the Maximo, the Olympic brain breaks, and Boogie Down. Airtime is a relaxing breathing activity and as you breathe in and out a bubble floats through the air, and when you land, you arrive at a virtual city in America. There is a fun postcard and you can see fun facts about the city.
Here is a screenshot of the bubble floating along. When we do it and I take part in the relaxed breathing, I am usually thinking, “Gee, I am all tense ! Good thing this is forcing me to chill out a bit!”
Here they are centering themselves and relaxing with Airtime.
To the Maximo is a really silly one where you do lots of stretches and Maximo makes corny jokes.
Boogie Down is a hysterical set of dances with a very goofy chicken. My students laugh and have so much fun with him.
In the Olympic videos, different athletes teach us how to perform in different events like the discus and shotput. Then you get to do the City Trials, and proceed on to other competitions with your class.
Here is one of the Olympians featured. He sure is easy on the eyes! 🙂
Here we are practicing our 200 M Sprint. They really went fast!
And this is what is looks like when your class is doing the 200M City Trials. We are running in place while these little guys run on the screen!
I could not be more delighted with GoNoodle. It was a sad sad day when my Chrome Book cord broke and we had to skip GoNoodle for a few days until I got a new cord and could charge up the Chrome Book.
I know there are at least two ways to project GoNoodle onto a screen in your classroom. If anyone knows any more, let me know. One is to open it on a Chrome Book, and Chromecast it up onto the TV. It is also playable on other laptops and desktops so you could project it with a projector onto a screen or Smart Board. I tried it first on the iPads and getting it on the TV via Apple TV but that did not work. Maybe GoNoodle will add the ability for iPad users to do so!
Let me know if your class loves GoNoodle too. Click on any of the images to go check it out and have some happy brain breaks!
