'Active Break Every Day' challenge to continue
By John Harrington
The ‘Active Break Every Day’ challenge will continue for a number of more weeks due to the hugely positively response from primary, post-primary, and special schools.
The initiative is a collaboration between the Active School Flag programme, Healthy Ireland, and the GAA, and supports teachers to build short movement breaks into their daily routine.
The challenge provides schools with a suite of short, classroom-based movement break videos that were filmed around Croke Park.
More than 1,600 schools and 400,000 students participated in the first four weeks of the challenge and more schools are now being encouraged to participate in the coming weeks.
Schools that wish to find out more or register to take part in the challenge can do so at the links at the bottom of this article.
Post Primary Active School Flag Development Officer, Carol O'Donnell, has been thrilled by the hugely positive response to the challenge.
“The partnership has been a great success between the two organisations and has brought a huge reach to schools by our contact within schools and then the GAA activity in schools,” says O’Donnell.
“There's just been a lot of interest across the whole country and the feedback from schools and from parents and from students has been really, really positive.”
In attendance at launch of the new Croke Park Active Breaks initiative are, backrow from left, ASF National Coordinator Karen Cotter, Minister of State at the Department of Health Jennifer Murnane O'Connor TD, Uachtarán Chumann Lúthchleas Gael Jarlath Burns, and Minister for Education and Youth, Hildegarde Naughton TD with front row from left, Andrea Gallagher, Teddy Kelly, Aaron O'Connor and Muireann Reen, at Croke Park in Dublin. The initiative provides school children with mental and physical health exercises in class. Photo by Sam Barnes/Sportsfile
The ‘Active Every Day Break’ break videos are presented by former Clare hurler Paul Flanagan in both English and Irish and have proven to be a big hit in classrooms.
“Even looking at them today, the views are increasing all the time, the first video has over 10,000 views now,” says O’Donnell.
“Schools are either repeating and continuing with it even though the challenge was meant to end last Friday. There was a request from schools to continue to access the videos and I think particularly the Irish versions because they want to use them during Seachtain na Gaeilge which is brilliant.
“The views of the Irish versions of the videos were much higher than the number of Gaeilscoileanna there are which means that in English speaking schools they're probably using them as part of their Irish lessons which is an added bonus that we didn't plan for or expect.”
The ‘Active Break Every Day’ challenge is designed to energise the school day, helping more students reach 60 minutes of daily physical activity.
“We know from so much research that has been done that a movement break enhances learning in terms of concentration and focus,” says O’Donnell.
“The brain needs that break and the movement increases the flow of blood to the brain so when the children do sit down afterwards it's easier for them to engage and their learning actually improves.
“To have these ready-made videos was really key because teachers didn't have to go to any extra effort, the videos were there and they just had to press play.
“Making it easy for teachers is one of the things that we know has worked really well. From the feedback we've gotten there was a lot of positive comments about the ease of access.”
Schools that wish to find out more or register to take part in the challenge can do so at the links below.