I’ve struggled a bit this year with getting my students to collaborate and communicate, so I am always experimenting with different ways to encourage these skills. While I’ve built quite a few collaboration and communication activities in our content, I also occasionally like to provide students opportunities to think critically and collaborate outside of my Environmental Earth Science Curriculum. Today I wanted to share two “Brain Break” activities that I’ve used to get my students talking, collaborating, and thinking critically. Rebus Puzzles I have long been a fan of Rebus puzzles as a warm up or bell ringer. The trick is making sure students don’t shout out answer the minute they figure it out. I use Pear Deck to have student first make their guesses. I then have them share their answers with their tables. Finally we have a class discussion focused on the clues that led us to the answer. This works really well when students come up with more than one reasonable answer. Student Pe
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