Winter Blahs and Student Restlessness!

The weather in our area has been terrible the last few weeks! We have had unusually cold temps, snow, and ice storms! So, we have had indoor recess for weeks now! The kiddos are tired of being cooped up inside and are having a hard time concentrating throughout the day!

Out of sheer desperation, I have been trying everything I can think of to get my students to concentrate for more than 30 seconds at a time!  Here are some fun ideas that are working and the kids love!

1) You Tube (my savior!) has some great short (2-3 min.) dance videos. Some just for fun, some with actual educational value - woo hoo! These are a few of my favorites:

Gummy Bear Dance

Shake Your Groove Thing

What Makes Ten

Count to 100 Macarena

If you search Just Dance For Kids, there are tons of fun dances!

2) Acting Time!  Have students get up and act out vocabulary words or act out parts of a story for comprehension. This gets them up and moving and very involved! For math, have them model problems - we are working on the make ten strategy for solving addition problems, so they can get up and move around to make ten frames using themselves as the markers!

3) Lay on floor and visualize for writing. Our last writing assignment I showed students a painting by Georges Seurat, then had them pretend they were in the painting. We laid down on the floor and pictured where we were in the painting, what we saw, felt, heard, etc. 

What are you doing to fight the winter restlessness? I would love more ideas! We are getting up and moving between just about every activity!