6 Most Delightful Activities To Engage Your Students With
Teaching is one of the noblest jobs one can have. This is because you dedicate every day of your job to other people and help them in their personal development. However, over the years of teaching, many teachers feel some kind of exhaustion caused mainly by the same monotonous routine. Likewise, the students often get tired as well, since they are becoming used to the same teaching techniques the teachers are employing.
To prevent this and make your classes more welcoming and joyful but at the same time educational, you can organize various activities that will keep both you and your students engaged in the teaching process. Not only will your classes become favourites among the students, but you will also be more eager and ready to come to work. To that end, here are the six most delightful activities to engage your students with!
Mime
Mime is another creative activity in which you can engage your students in an educational and fun way! This is a really well-liked game where hilarious revisions of action phrases or verbs are made.
To perform it, teams are initially formed from the class. The teacher writes action verbs like “driving,” “swimming,” “singing,” etc., on pieces of paper. After folding, it is put in a box or bag. A team member arrives, selects a piece of paper, and acts out the word. To get a point, the other team must correctly guess the word.
The good thing about the game is that it can promote critical as well as creative thinking. For instance, the one who mimics the verbs has to find creative ways to depict the verb in the best possible and approachable way, whereas the students have to think critically in order to decipher the mimic code. Likewise, this activity can be used with all age groups, from the youngest to the oldest. This is done by simply increasing or decreasing the abstractness of a verb. For example, with younger students, you can use verbs such as cooking or eating, but with more mature students, you can use the more complex and abstract verbs such as discriminate, navigate, magnetize, ratify, etc.
In any case, it is certain the students will have a lot of fun and will learn many things!
Socially Useful Activities
School is not only about learning facts and numbers. By contrast, it is much more. It is also about learning about compassion, empathy, solidarity, ethics, morals, good and polite behaviour, and honesty. You can promote these socially useful values by engaging your students in both creative and purposeful activities. For instance, you can organise fundraising for an important issue in the city.
Likewise, you can also organize park or beach cleaning, fundraise for river cleaning, and much more. For instance, a school colour run is a way you can include your students in fundraising activities. As they emerge from colourful clouds, students rush towards the finish line, filling the air with joy and laughter. There are plenty of ways to implement inspirational ideas on fundraising and thus engage your students in beneficial and educational activities, but this one is one of the best. Both you and your students will enjoy it, and on top of that, you will achieve worthwhile results!
Jigsaw Puzzle
Jigsaw puzzles are one of the most engaging and delightful activities where your students can learn a lot from each other. To do this activity, you will need a few handouts with teaching materials. For example, if you want to teach your students about the history of Egypt and its mythology, you can print individual papers with this information on them.
For example, one paper can talk about the Egyptian gods and religion, another paper can describe the act of mummification, the third paper can give a historical overview of the Egyptian kingdoms and dynasties, and the fifth paper will talk about the pharaohs. The idea is to have a complete teaching unit broken down into the most important segments that are complementary to each other.
Next, you will divide your students into five groups, and each group should be given a copy of one of the papers. For instance, the first group will get a few handouts about Egyptian religion, whereas another one will get the ones about Egyptian pharaohs, etc. Once all groups have been provided with the handouts, give them instructions to carefully read the handouts and synthesize the main ideas and points into a 5-minute oral presentation they are supposed to give in 20 minutes.
Likewise, encourage discussion within the groups and teamwork. Also, help the students make their own synopses of the handouts and help them to be cooperative and creative.
After approximately 20 minutes, ask the students to start mingling around the classroom and go from one group to another, giving their 5-minute presentation about their findings. This way, all the students will have the opportunity to speak about what they have learned, as well as listen to their colleagues about additional information about the same topic.
After this, all the students will have learned many facts about Egyptian history in an innovative, engaging, and effective way. Instead of receiving information from their teacher as always, they will have an opportunity to become teachers to their colleagues, as well as their students. The atmosphere will be much better, and the students will enjoy it!
Role Play Teaching
Role-playing is an especially productive and engaging activity in foreign language learning classes. Therefore, if you are teaching a foreign language, then it is a great idea to organise this kind of activity. For instance, you could divide your students into pairs and give them certain assignments. For example, you can give one student the role of a doctor and the other one the role of a patient. This way, the students will have a specified context and will be able to express themselves better in a foreign language.
Likewise, they will remember better. This is because it has been argued that learning is facilitated by the use of adequate context. Thus, the students will likely be able to recall the grammatical units from the role plays they have performed. This teaching strategy stands in stark contrast to traditional rote learning and forces students to talk in a non-native language about “something interesting”. It is always better to give your students a good context first and then let them derive information from it on their own. With these innovative activities, your students will be able to build their speaking fluency better and enjoy your classes more!
Total Physical Response (TPR)
People learn by doing. Indeed, this is one of the teaching principles: people are more likely to learn something by actually doing it than merely listening to it. It is this principle, however, that stands at the core of TPR activities. For example, in the lower grades, you can use TPR to teach young learners certain verbs or nouns. For instance, if you want to teach your students the meaning of the verb “to clap,” you can clap your hands and say “clap your hands.”
Afterwards, you will ask your students to do the same and repeat it a few times. It is argued that pairing auditory and physical stimuli enhances learning, and in this activity, that is what you actually encourage your students to do!
Quizzes
If you want to encourage your students to revise the teaching materials more regularly, you can do it by engaging them in competitive and innovative activities. For instance, you can make a PowerPoint presentation with questions and associations related to the teaching materials you have taught in the previous classes. By asking your students questions and providing them with helpful hints, they will try to remember the important points from the previous lectures. Whenever someone gets the right answer, you will give them certain points. This way, not only will your students revise a lot in this class, but they will also be more eager to revise at home so that they can beat their peers in the next quiz game.
To make it more engaging, you can ask your students to make their own lists of questions and then in pair-work, ask them to their colleagues. The important segment of quizzes is competitiveness. Every student will be motivated to score better every time, and this will encourage them to be more studious and knowledgeable. To achieve this, they will put more effort into revising and learning new things. Finally, make sure you don’t stick to a small range of activities but opt for many of them! The students will have a lot of fun and will get good revision at the same time!
Everyone wants to remember their student days fondly. You can make your students’ school days memorable by making your classes engaging and creative. You can achieve this by employing different activities in every class. In that sense, make sure you implement some of these ideas, and your students will certainly be more motivated to come to your classes and actively participate in them. The end result will be the following: you will be happier with your job and yourself, while the students will be more motivated, enthusiastic, and passionate about learning new things every day!
