Engaging Students (TPE1)

Bringing Students In

Working with a class of 25 second graders, I am met each day with updates about football games, I'm handed art projects they made for me the previous night, and hear a multitude of seemingly random questions about bugs, flowers, and many other things. These quick conversations in the morning never fail to make me smile, and even now as I write about this, I am reminded how blessed I am to have worked with a class full of students with unique gifts and interests. 

I learned pretty early on that this is a group that loves sports; my CT is a big Dodgers fan and about half of the students are on flag football teams. While it is one thing to connect with your students about these things outside of class, I think it can be even more meaningful when you are able to connect to their interests during class. In second grade, students complete a unit on graphing. As soon as I found out what lessons from this unit I would be teaching, I began thinking of ways I could bring in the students' love of sports to the lessons. The first day we were talking about picture graphs, I chose to have the class gather data about their favorite sports. This was immediately met with a few shouts of what sports were their favorites, resulting in me reminding the class it is important to raise your hand when you have something to add so that we can hear everyone's ideas. That being said, I was excited to see their excitement about making a picture graph (1.1). 

Keeping Students Engaged

While connecting to students' interests is a helpful way to get students' attention, I have been thinking a lot this semester about how to keep students engaged. At the beginning of the semester, I relied very heavily on my written lesson plans, but with practice I became more comfortable changing my original plan based on students’ needs or other events outside of my control. One area I see the most growth with this is math. Often I have students get out their whiteboards and solve the subtraction or addition problem on their own and show me their answer before erasing so I can provide immediate feedback. This allows me to know what students are understanding the concept and what students would benefit from more practice and support (1.8). More on this in Assessing Learning (TPE 5). 

Another way I found to keep students engaged is by providing hands-on activities. In my social studies unit on explorers, I tried to balance days with more note taking with days that were more student-led. One way I did this while connecting what we were learning to students' lives today was planning a lesson where they were explorers. They searched outside for the hidden bug pieces and then worked as teams to put the bugs together. As I wrote in my reflection on the unit, I can still hear the excited screams of joy when students completed one of the bugs. This then led to conversations about ways we can still explore today (1.3).  

Supporting All Students

Just like my students all have unique interests, they also all have unique skills and areas they can grow. With this in mind, I tried to plan lessons that presented new content in a variety of ways to support all of my students. One specific way I did this was in our daily literacy centers. Once a week we would learn new vocabulary words. Each of these vocabulary words had a picture card to go with it. To make what could have been a mundane review of words more interesting I called on students to randomly pick one of the cards and read the word to the group. We would then talk about what was going on in the picture and some groups would enjoy guessing what the new word meant. Finally, I would share the definition with the students and they would have an opportunity to use it in a sentence and connect it back to their lives. I think that presenting the vocabulary in this way gave students many onramps to the lesson and allowed a variety of opportunities for students to share their ideas (1.4, 1.6); it was also fun.