Body and Mind Activities

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Body and Mind

HIIT Homework

Stick on your favourite upbeat playlist and try out these exercises one after the other. To give yourself a bigger challenge, do each circuit twice or three times or more! Spotify is free to download and has lots of songs.

Session 1 – 5 x 25 Session 2 – legs moving Session 3 – up and down
  1. 25 jumping jacks
  2. 25 squats
  3. 25 seconds run on the spot
  4. 25 push ups
  5. 25 seconds plank
  1. 30 seconds run on the spot
  2. 30 seconds high knees
  3. 30 seconds jumping jacks
  4. 30 seconds butt kicks
  5. 30 seconds jog on the spot
  1. 30 seconds jumping jacks
  2. 30 seconds mountain climbers
  3. 30 seconds run on the spot
  4. 30 seconds plank
  5. 30 seconds burpees

OR

Have a family disco – stick on your favourite tunes and bop around the room for 20 minutes!

Get Outside

Try out as many of these exercises outside (keeping social distance!) that you can and tell your teacher which ones you’ve done.

  • Cycle your bike for 10 minutes
  • Go for a walk
  • Ride your scooter for 10 minutes
  • Draw your own hopscotch with chalk and play
  • Throw a ball against a wall and catch
  • Create your own obstacle course
  • Run for 5 minutes
  • 10 minutes of free play outside
  • If possible walk home from school one day
  • Jump on your trampoline
  • Walk your dog
  • Bubble bashing – get someone to blow bubbles for you to try and burst all of them
  • Do 3 laps of your house or up and down the hall 10 times
  • Keepie uppies – how many can you do in a row?
  • Skip sideways up and down the garden 5 times- be sure to check out Mark Mc Cabe on Facebook for tutorials that the girls have done as part of the skipping wokrshop. Now is a chance to perfect the skills!SkipnRope

Skype with a Relative

This can be a nice idea if you have a family member who may have to self-isolate or

who you may not be able to visit. It’s a way for children to use oral language and it might be a nice kind of game to play to keep boredom away.

Ideas include:

  1. Play 20 questions – take turns in thinking of an object and the other person can only ask questions which have a yes or no answer.
  2. A-Z – Pick a topic and take turns in naming something beginning with A then B then C and see if you can get to Z Without skipping any letters.
  3. The Big Interview – child prepares 10 questions they’d like to know about the relative and then asks them
  4. More ideas here: https://www.fluentu.com/blog/educator-english/esl-vocabulary-games/

Irish Times

Even if you can’t speak Irish, there are some great ways to pick up some vocabulary. One really easy activity is to pick a topic, for example: food, household objects, colours, and so on, then write down 20 words associated with that topic in a list. Next go to https://www.focloir.ie/en/ and translate the words. The great thing is that almost every word on the website has an audio recording of it so you can listen to how to pronounce the words! As a family, you could try and learn a few words every day!

For more advanced speakers, how about doing any of the tasks in the grid through Irish? The news is probably the easiest one to do as Gaeilge.

The Daily News

This task can be done with any age from Junior Infants to 6th class. It can be done in a number of ways but here is a suggestion for 2 different age groups:

Infants to 1st Class 2nd Class Upwards
  • Child tells you the news they have for the day. Stick to things in their own life rather than focusing on the news on the radio or TV.
    • The day, the date, the weather outside
    • 1 or 2 things they did yesterday
  • Write down what they tell you on a whiteboard or piece of paper.
  • Child either types out what you’ve written or copies it down in a journal or copybook.
  • You can create your own little newsroom on the kitchen table or you can use Green Screen apps on an iPad and record your child reading their news.
  • You can upload the video to Google Classroom or send it to loved ones to keep in touch.
   Child writes/types their news as well as news happening outside the world.  You can create your own little newsroom on the kitchen table or you can use Green Screen apps on an iPad and record your child reading their news.

  You can send it to loved ones to keep in touch.

Read a Book with a Parent

Relax on the couch and spend ten minutes reading for no other reason than the joy of reading a book. Of course, there are loads of benefits to reading every day but what a nice time to drop everything for a short time.

Family Tree

Make your family tree with your child. You can do this digitally or by hand and you can go back as far as you want!

BIGGER PROJECTS

These instructions are for these projects:

  • The History of my Family          An extension of the Family Tree Project – tell us about your family
  • Peace                                        What does peace mean to you? How will we get here?
  • Who is your favourite artist?      Tell us something about your favourite artist – A singer? A painter? A poet?
  • My Holiday                                Tell us about your last holiday

A Sketch A Day

If you have a copybook or sketchpad, this would be useful but you don’t really need anything except paper and a pencil. Your job is to create one sketch a day for the duration of the project. The only catch is you have to pick a theme. Choose from:

  • Healthy Foods
  • Happy Things
  • Things that need batteries
  • Famous People
  • Objects that are usually red

Learn a musical instrument

Do you have a musical instrument at home? If not, it’s not too expensive to get yourself a tin whistle, recorder or even a ukulele. It’s never been easier to learn with loads of apps and websites to bring you along the way.

Tin Whistle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdUH1QZvEm8

Piano / Keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJOfTzSYW-9q2WSmGH1CNjmP3–2qaXN5

Ukulele: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bTE5fbxDsc

Puppet Show

Making a puppet show can be a fun way to spend some time and there’s lots of different ways to do it now.

  1. Make a sock puppet – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-mfUBQE3_s
  2. Make finger puppets – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eq370x_lvo
  3. Make an online Puppet Show – Puppet Pals App

The main thing is to write the scripts and record them! If you have a puppet show stage, great; if not, use a table to hide underneath!

Mathematics

Set up a Mathletics account and play for 5-10 minutes. https://www.mathletics.eu

Cool Patterns

Patterns are everywhere – some of them simple like the sequence of a traffic light and some of them are really difficult like the swirls on a snail’s shell. Your job is to make a pattern using any medium you want. You could knit a scarf in 2 different colours or you could build a tower using Lego with different patterned levels. You could even write a long sequence of numbers that follow a pattern.