An Engaging Lesson Activity Your Least-Interested Students Will Love

There are lots of theories on the many different ways to make lessons more appealing to apathetic, disinterested students; to improve engagement, get them interested and taking part. 

Here’s an activity which, at Needs Focused Teaching, we’ve found to be very effective. 

It works on the principle that most disruptive students tend to be kinaesthetic learners - they need to be up on their feet and doing things with their hands. Asking them to sit still and listen or write things down in a book for the whole lesson is a guaranteed formula for work avoidance, arguments and disruption. 

So a simple way of raising engagement in your classroom is to include active or kinaesthetic learning activities. 

And here’s a really simple way to do it. We call it a Learning Kit. 

At the start of the lesson students are given an envelope or a bag, something they can get their hands on and hold. And this contains resources for the task - a learning kit. 

One of the benefits of this is that it creates an immediate sense of curiosity. This means students are buying in to your lesson right from the start. They want to know more. They want to know what this kit is for.

Give them a book or a worksheet and they switch off. But give them something they’ve never seen before which they can hold and feel, and there is instant engagement. 

For example, with younger children, the task might be to create a bar chart and rather than drawing it in a their exercise book or on paper, their learning Kit enables them to create a physical bar chart. 

It might contain a ruler, a pair of scissors, some graph paper, some coloured pieces of paper they can cut into strips, a few pens and a datasheet. And all that is presented as a little kit – perhaps in sealed envelope with Top Secret written on it – together with instructions to create the bar chart. These instructions could be written or they could be recorded as an audio file for added curiosity and engagement.  

The Learning Kit grabs attention, provides an enjoyable, hands-on, kinaesthetic activity and frees the teacher to offer support as required. 

Another idea might be to provide a collection of pictures or photos in the kit with the simple instruction to put them into a sequence, perhaps to explain a geological process or to place events in history in date order. Or maybe to retell a section from a book. Or it could be a sorting or matching exercise. You could for example, have character descriptions on one set of cards  and on other would be photographs or pictures of the character and the students have to pair them up. 

This is simple stuff – we are simply taking normal book work and turning it into an engaging physical activity. 

This is just one of THOUSANDS of novel, creative ways to win the hearts of tough students and improve classroom management contained in the best-selling book Take Control of the Noisy Class.

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