Activities in the classroom

Hey everyone! Welcome bak to another entry😁

For this week we were back in the classroom and did a little recap on lesson planning and everything we learned last week, with lesson planning also comes being creative, teacher Orlando gave us som examples of some activities to group the different students in the classroom or to measure time.

A very important thing that every teacher should know is that when students get called by their name they feel motivated, or encouraged or just special that a teacher remembered their name, so it would be good to start with having some name tags for every student and that way everyone can get to know each other.

Here is teacher Orlando showing his name tag

Yesterday's class was all about how to make the class a little bit more dynamic so that maybe some students won't be falling asleep, it is also important to praise students for their good work and measure participation, there are so many things that can be incorporated into a classroom to make it more fun and avoid the traditional way.

We can group students let's say by their month of birth or maybe the first letter of their first name or just group them by something they have in common, that way they get to work with new people and we don't have the same groups in class and everytime is all new.

Another activity can be to measure time, you don't necessarily have to measure 5 minutes on your clock, you can play some background music while students are discussing or play a song that lasts exactly five minutes just try and not to play a song that will distract them.

An activity to elicit participation can be to give them candy or something that my English teacher did when I was in the 6th grade I think, she had a rubber stamp and she called it the "Super Star", she would give us a super star for every assignment that we handed or just some extra work and you had to have the first page of your notebook filled with super stars in order to get some bonus points, I remember everyone in my class would get so competitive but it was a great way to motivate everyone to actually do their assignments and try their best.

It is also important to praise students and make them feel like their hard work is being rewarded or that they are appreciated, again, candy can work just fine or an idea I had was that if someone participated often in class or they got a lot of answers correctly they can get 5 more minutes of their break or this can also apply to the whole class, they have to build their team work in order to get a reward for everyone.

I know that the point of a class is for students to learn and teachers to teach, but sometimes it has to go beyond that, as you can see , there are many fun activities that teacher can incorporate to the classroom and that way no one will get bored and you will have your students looking forward to each of your classes, it doesn't matter if your group are not toddlers, everyone likes to have fun no matter what their age is.

Another thing that we learned is the warm-up activity and this activity can have different purposes, for example to review the previous knowledge or to introduce a new topic or you can do one just for fun right before starting the class to get the students in a good mood, it is also great to build a community and teach students team work, let's say that if one students does not know the answer everyone else can help them. A warm-up activity has to be short, dynamic, it has to last around 7 minutes and it has to be an opportunity for students to engage in the topic. If the warm-up activity is short then the wrap up has to be even shorter. 

Teacher Orlando gave us some really nice examples of the different activities, as a teacher you will need to be carrying around lots of random objects that will help you with the activities, I really like the activity towards the end where we had to roll the dice and depending on the number we got we had to say that many adjectives about ourselves.

One of the random objects of a teacher, the magic hat😂

Being creative is key, teachers need to come up with all kinds of activites that students will enjoy but they of course need to be related to a certain topic.

That was it for this entry, hope you enjoyed reading and stay tuned for my next entry after our vacations!🌞