4 Ways to arouse curiosity among learners.

4 Ways to arouse curiosity among learners.

Learning and curiosity are interconnected. Curiosity determines the self interest of the learner. Once the self interest is aroused, a student bends towards learning. He listens and understands to satisfy his own needs. Active learners always show great interest in their surroundings. They want to know more and this quest of theirs is enough to take them to great heights.

A teacher must take care to arous

e the interest level of the students. This helps them to focus on the talk being delivered by the teacher.

There are different ways to make a learner curious.

a.       Teaching Aid: Carry a teaching aid to the class. The students are really curious to know how the teaching aid is going to be connected to the story that is meant for them. They ask questions and try to find answers on their own.  A teacher can take up many discussions with a single teaching aid. It is not necessary that huge and complicated teaching aids should be made for the children. But even something as simple as a paper boat can provide many solutions and narrate many stories for the children.

b.      Throwing questions: As soon as you enter ask certain questions to the students. Ex: Why is there a lot of ice on the poles? They start wondering and get connected to you.

c.       Position in the classroom: Most teachers have a habit of entering the class and standing in one particular place. At times one must enter and go and stand at the back of the class.

d.      Closed fists: Enter with closed fists in the class and ask the children to guess what will come out of the fists. Or ask them to guess in which fist will they find a paper or a coin.

These strategies are just clues. There are many things which help you to make your students curious. Try these out.

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5 Strategies to Teach Comprehension

Comprehension is the crux of reading. Unless a reader understands the text given in the book, reading does not make sense. Hence teaching comprehension is very important to the students at the same time it is not a very easy task.

The child who has well developed comprehension skills will be much ahead in academics. The reason is that he will be abl

e to apply knowledge to get the desired result.

Below mentioned are some of the comprehension strategies which can be useful to develop good readers who can understand well.

a.     Reading Fluency: Develop reading fluency among the children first. When they are able to read age appropriate material fluently, only then can they concentrate on understanding the meaning of the text. But educators and parents need to understand that reading fluency is not the same as reading comprehension. Comprehension focuses on understanding the text, inferring meaning and retaining the gained knowledge.

b.     Imagination: Ask the students to close the books. The teacher reads the text and asks the students to draw pictures of what they just heard. This helps them to expand their imagination and most importantly they think.

c.      Main idea or central theme: Ask the children to point out the central theme of the paragraphs or the text.

d.     Make maps or diagrams: The students can be asked to make maps or flow charts of the movement of the characters of the story.

e.      Difficult words: Teach the students to underline the difficult words if they do not understand their meaning. After completing the text and understanding the passage ask them to relate the meaning of the word by reading the text. Then ask them to cross check their meanings with the dictionary. With this exercise they get into the habit of finding the meaning by inferring an idea by relating words. 

10 Things to do at the beginning of every school year.

Come along a new session and each teacher and child is brimming with a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Each year brings new challenges and it is nice to see everyone embracing them with open arms and a smile with a quote ‘We have a solution for every problem.’ It si the best time of the year as everyone is optimistic and so a lot of progress is harnessed.

Below mentioned are a list of things a teacher must do to begin a year.

a.      Read, Read and Read: Every teacher must read a lot of books or binge into blog reading about books, how to improve reading habits of children, or classroom management, or bulletin boards, etc. Reading helps you to gather a lot of information. It may not come in handy all at once, but your mind has a trait of giving the dose to you at the right time i.e. when you require it the most. Reading also comes in planning to a great extent. (Picture of reading material)

A good link which shows you how to work on Phonics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzHVmX1pnc8

Below given is a very good link of website which has material to read

http://www.readingrockets.org/audience/teachers

b.      Maintain a journal: Maintaining a journal helps you to note down your teaching aims for the year. It gives you a good start. Your daily to do list can also go in the journal and hence you can keep track of your goals for the coming session.

c.       Day one activities: Plan out good Day-One activities for the students. If it’s a new session, then you need to gear up for the budding enthusiasts who are going to come to your class. Make your activities colorful, and filled with fun. Even if it is a session break, day one activities set the ball rolling for the coming session.

d.      Bulletin Boards:  Unique and creative ideas are available on the internet for bulletin boards. Make your class attractive by decorating bulletin boards in your classroom to remove the slumber from the children if there is any.

e.       High Energy Level:  First day of the school is tiring after vacations but keep the energy level very high to ensure that your children also receive the message of ‘Back to work.’

f.       Classroom Rules: Classroom rules set the tone of the teaching and behavior of the children. Hence make rules which the children must remember to follow. It is good to discuss the rules with the children. It gives them a taste of how important decision making is.

g.      Classroom Helpers: Make children responsible for certain tasks in the classroom. Make classroom helpers for proper delegation and implementation of work.

h.      Good Lesson Planning: Everything said and done nothing can replace good teaching. Browse, discuss, create, innovate and come up with good teaching ideas which would suffice for sometime to come or else until too much work grapples you. Making a note of teaching ideas in the journal will also help you to recapitulate whenever you are running short of time to research and come up with something new.

i.        Personal Time and feedback: Remember the children need your personal attention during school hours. All the more so when the school starts as there are many new things which they need to understand to start their learning process. Understanding instructions given by a new person is also difficult sometimes. Hence it is said that patience is the key at this time with the students. Take a feedback from the children before they go home on day one about the classroom, or classroom rules of bulletin boards or the lesson taught by you. Feedback is a great way of building appositive relationship with the children.

j.        Speak out Loud: You can also have a Speak out Loud activity wherein the child is encouraged to speak about How he spent the day in school. This also gives you an insight on how to deal with the children of your class.

OH! This is too much work for day One! But it pays to do all of this. You can add or reduce the task and adjust it according to your classroom needs.

I can already feel the excitement in the air to start the new session.

Best Of Luck!

Next: 5 Ways to give Instructions to the Students.