My oldest daughter sent me a recent article from Today.com. It was about how the Eagle Mountain Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas went from giving its kindergarten and first-grade classes one twenty-minute recess per day to four fifteen-minute recesses per day. At first some of the teachers were skeptical. As Donna McBride, a first-grade teacher put it, “I was trying to wrap my head around my class going outside four times a day and still being able to teach those children all the things they needed to learn.”

The article went on to say, “Some five months into the experiment, McBride’s fears have been alleviated. Her students are less fidgety and more focused, she said. They listen more attentively, follow directions and try to solve problems on their own instead of coming to the teacher to fix everything. There are (also) fewer discipline issues.” The same thing holds true for working adults. If we’re going to be able to perform at our best all day long, we need to take regular breaks where we disengage from what we’re doing and allow our brains and our bodies to reboot. If you would like to read the entire article, here’s the link.

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