Lesson 4: Engaging Learners in Today’s Classrooms

Mrs Nelson Uses many ways to engage her students in the classroom.

Active: Mrs. Nelson has her students do jumping jacks as they count to 100 by 10's, also she has them dance to the "Letter Song" The children watch a video about the Letter of the day and get to have a dance party as they make the sound that the letter makes. Activities like this help get the wiggles out of the students as well as using another way to reinforce the information

Hands-on: When doing math Mrs. Nelson uses block cubes to help students with addition. Instead of just looking at numbers they select how many of each color block they want to combine together and then do the addition sentence using that. This gives the kids another way other than written work to reinforce the difficult concepts of math.

Fun: This is probably what Mrs. Nelson is best at. Whether it be using a weather wizard to choose the weather for the day, or puppets to help the students structure sentences properly, most of the lessons in Mrs. Nelsons class are extremely fun for these Kindergartners.  One of my favorite examples of this was during a story time Mrs. Nelson had me conduct. We read The Mitten by Jan Brett. Instead of just reading the story, each student was given an animal mask that related to a character in the book and when their animal climbed in the mitten that student would climb under a white blanket we used. The students had so much fun with this, especially when it came time for the sneeze. The students scattered all over the reading time mat and laughed and giggled.

One area of Mrs. Nelson's class that is not as engaging is during writing time. Students do get to draw a picture to go along with their sentence or word, but it mostly consists of students sitting and working on their own. Perhaps every once in a while during writing time she could have the students collaborate to come up with a sentence, have each student write that sentence down and then draw a picture together, or create a scene acting out their sentence. This would incorporate Collaboration and Active to create a more engaging writing time.