Teachers have an opportunity every day to inspire their students. To ensure that the lessons they teach are remembered and provide some inspiration for the students to keep learning. The resources for students today are abundant. It’s having the freedom to explore and making the decision to want to learn that’s limiting our children’s education in the classroom. Teachers need to persuade and inspire students to make that decision. To encourage, to push them to do better, and to teach differently to reach those who have been raised with the internet, smartphones and tablets and with Google at their fingertips.
As an author, I believe creativity enhances the engagement factor and stokes the imagination and desire to learn more, to explore, to help set in place a thirst for knowledge, no matter how small it may be in the beginning. When the class looks listless and the heads are drooping, when the ‘engagement’ factor seems to be at an all time low, I’ve done some exercises with students that may help. Here are three I’ve used.
20 minute fiction
After a lesson or a book chapter, challenge students to write their own short story. You may want to incorporate a few rules, as it will help development. I like to set a word count at 150. Time limits are also great as it keeps them focused on utilising every minute they have. You can vary the challenges by varying the time limits: the harder the challenge the shorter the time. I’ve done workshops with seniors that were five-minute challenges and in some I wrote super challenge words on the whiteboard and said they had to be included in their short stories.
English – Hollywood style
There is nothing more alluring than the possibility your classroom is a ‘yet to be discovered talent’. Instead of reading Of Mice & Men from the front of the classroom or having the students read it aloud, try substituting a movie script. The wow factor is surreal and it’s a fresh approach on energising the students. It may not be what’s on the curriculum but it’s an effective way of getting students to read and the curiosity factor works to your advantage. Encourage them also to act out the cowboy accents or the drill sergeant or what ever the characters are in the movie script. I feel the first key is to get students interested and intrigued
that is most important in any workshop or lesson.
Where do I get the free, legal movie scripts I hear you ask?
http://www.simplyscripts.com
Poetry Lesson
The enthusiasm of students for poetry is generally on a level with watching paint dry and probably the paint would win out nine times out of ten. I think the never-fail first poem to introduce students to poetry should be Cinderella by Roald Dahl.
Why Cinderella? It’s funny. It’s realistic for students and older children to imagine. Each line tells a story and it’s very descriptive. You could challenge them to write their own poem based on fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin/Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Below are the first six lines of Cinderella:
I guess you think you know this story.
You don’t. The real one’s much more gory.
The phoney one, the one you know,
Was cooked up years and years ago,
And made to sound all soft and sappy
just to keep the children happy.