David A. Sousa - Brain-Compatible Activities, Grades 3–5

Copyright 2008 by Corwin.

First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Lisa Riley

Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-371-6

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0113-7

Printed in China

TABLE OF CONTENTS

	Activities and reproducibles
	Activities and reproducibles
	Activities and reproducibles
	Activities and reproducibles
	Activities and reproducibles

Connections to Standards

This chart shows the national academic standards that are covered in each chapter.

Introduction

B rain-compatible activities are often louder and contain more movement than traditional lessons. Research has shown that purposeful talking and movement encourage retention of new learning. While this may seem out of your comfort zone at first, good classroom management and a willingness to try new things is all that is needed to implement these activities in any classroom. Once you and your students become accustomed to brain-compatible strategies, you will find it difficult to go back to more traditional teaching methods. Students (and teachers!) enjoy lessons that actively involve their brains, and the brains that are actively involved are the brains that learn.

It has been estimated that teachers make over 1,600 decisions per day. As professional educators, it is our job to be familiar with current research to make sure those decisions count for our students. This book is filled with activities that are supported by brain research. These activities will help increase learning because they are structured to maximize the brains learning potential.

How to Use This Book

The activities in this book are designed using a brain-compatible lesson plan format. There are nine components of the plan, but not all nine are necessary for every lesson. Those components that are most relevant to the learning objective should be emphasized.

Anticipatory set

Learning objective

Purpose

Input

Modeling

Check for understanding

Guided practice

Closure

Independent practice

Each of the components is described in detail in my book titled How the Brain Learns, Third Edition (2006). Refer to it for more brain-compatible research and other teaching strategies.

When using the activities in this book, read through the activity first. Then begin the preparations for the lesson. Make sure to follow the lesson plan format to ensure maximum learning potential. However, be flexible enough to meet the needs of all learners in your class. A positive classroom climate is essential for retention.

Put It Into Practice

H ow the brain learns has been of particular interest to teachers for centuries. Now, in the twenty-first century, there is new hope that our understanding of this remarkable process called teaching and learning will improve dramatically. A major source of that understanding is coming from the sophisticated medical instruments that allow scientists to peer inside the livingand learningbrain.

As we examine the clues that this research yields about learning, we recognize its importance to the teaching profession. Every day teachers enter their classrooms with lesson plans, experience, and the hope that what they are about to present will be understood, remembered, and useful to their students. The extent that this hope is realized depends largely on the knowledge base teachers use in designing those plans and, perhaps more important, in the strategies and techniques they select for instruction. Teachers try to change the human brain every day. The more they know about how it learns, the more successful they will be.