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Fun Tools for the Classroom

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Use these reources to develop fun assignments that will allow your students to share their creative abilities.

25 Clever Classroom Tips For Elementary School Teachers. 22 Simple Ideas for Harnessing Creativity in the Elementary Classroom. Here's an experiment you can conduct in many schools, maybe even the school where you teach. Look through the door of one classroom and you might see the students hunched over, not engaged, even frowning. The teacher looks frazzled, tired and wishing he or she were somewhere else.

You might think, "Well, everyone has a bad day. " But you might witness this scenario in this teacher's classroom no matter what day you look through the door. What is the second teacher doing that the first one isn't? Creativity is innovation. Creativity is thinking outside the box. Creativity is improvisation. Creativity is professional growth. Creativity is being a risk taker or mold breaker. Creativity is passion. Suggested Activities: The Game of Learning For the first six activities, seat your students in a circle and introduce a ball or something else they can pass easily between them. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Suggested Activities: The Artsy Side of Creative 9. 10. 11. 12. Creative Science 13. 14. 15. 16. 5 Proven Ways to Engage Students In Your Classroom. The eyes roll back, the mouth scowls, the fingers grip the not-so-secretly hidden cellphone, and the brain checks out. These are, as teachers everywhere can attest, the surefire signs of a disengaged student. And these symptoms are ravaging the educational system. Teachers know that student engagement is the key to learning retention and having a great overall classroom experience, but they often don’t have the time or energy to come up with some of the outrageous things that they see other teachers doing online to keep kids’ interest. Some of us just can’t plan a flash mob for every lesson. Disengaged students are unmotivated to complete their work, apathetic about learning outcomes, and resistant to participating in classwork. This behavior can become contagious – threatening the classroom dynamics and undermining the positive community you’ve worked so hard to build with your students.

Everyone has suggestions for improving student engagement. In Short. Actively Engage Students Using Hands-on & Minds-on Instruction. Contrary to popular belief, “active engagement” involves more than “hands-on” instruction. Years ago, I discovered this when I realized that hands-on teaching didn’t always result in student learning. Yes, my students had fun, but follow-up activities showed little grasp of essential concepts. How could that be? My students appeared to be actively engaged, but apparently only their hands and their mouths were active! My “ah-ah” moment came when I realized that both minds and hands are necessary for active engagement. The “minds-on” factor was the missing piece of the equation. When students are fully engaged in a task, they are actively doing and actively thinking.

Luckily, there are dozens of active engagement “tools” you can use to spark excitement and add rigor to your lessons. These classroom games... Use these teaching strategies to ensure feedback is maximized in your classroom. Here are a few classroom activities that will help students develop habits that... Active Engagement Tools. Computer Science Education Week. 7 Apps for Teaching Children Coding Skills. It's hard to imagine a single career that doesn't have a need for someone who can code. Everything that "just works" has some type of code that makes it run. Coding (a.k.a. programming) is all around us. That's why all the cool kids are coding . . . or should be. Programming is not just the province of pale twenty-somethings in skinny jeans, hunched over three monitors, swigging Red Bull.

If you're concerned that that a) elementary school students don't have the ability to code, b) there's no room in the curriculum, and c) you don't possess coding chops to teach programming skills, throw out those worries. In no particular order, we have listed all the coding apps that are appropriate for young learners. GameStar Mechanic Platform: WebCost: $2 per student GameStar Mechanic teaches kids, ages 7-14, to design their own video games.

Scratch Platform: WebCost: Free! Tynker Platform: WebCost: Free! Move the Turtle Hopscotch Platform: iPadCost: Free! Daisy the Dinosaur Platform: iPadCost: Free! Kahoot! | Game-based blended learning & classroom response system. Google for Education: Save time and stay connected. PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. SurveyMonkey: Free online survey software & questionnaire tool. Blogger. TodaysMeet - Give everyone a voice (Students will enjoy backchanneling) The Story Spine.pdf. Stoodle.