This is a simple and useful tip I picked up from my mentor teacher while I was student teaching.
She was starting them on a new math unit that required the use of math manipulatives. Noisy stuff. Each student was given a pile of shapes– green triangles, orange square, red trapezoids, blue rhombuses– you know the type. And then she said, “Go ahead and play with them for a few minutes, and then we’ll get started.”
She came back to where I saw on the back table and said, “Whenever you give them manipulatives or anything they can touch and feel, give them a few minutes to play and explore with it. It’ll get it out of their system so when you actually start your lesson, they’re more ready to focus on what you’re teaching rather than to just keep trying to play with them!” We sat back there and watched them have at it.
Parents: It’s your son’s birthday party. On the invitation, you wrote that the party would go from 12:00-3:00pm. It’s 2:00pm, and you’ve already gone through all the activities you had planned. You told the kids they could just “play” until their parents arrived, and now you have twenty kids running around your house wreaking havoc on your newly polished floors and white walls. EEK.
Teachers: It’s field trip day, and the bus just dropped you off at the museum entrance. For some reason, all the doors are locked and no staff is there to greet you. After waiting ten minutes, you call the main office and are told they’ll be there in twenty minutes. Your students are entertaining themselves– some sitting in small groups chatting, others running around and playing a violent version of tag. Chaperones make a half-hearted attempt to calm some kids down, but let’s be honest– everybody wants to be the cool chaperone, so they won’t go too hard on the kids. Their behavior is already spiraling out of control, and you have another twenty minutes to wait. EEK. What do you do??
Play a game. A simple, quiet, but active and FUN game! Sound too good to be true? Read on and try it, my friend, and be won over.
Parents and teachers, this one’s for you. If you are regularly around kids, you know there are frequently pockets of time when you need to keep them occupied. Whether it’s the last few minutes at the end of a school day or you’re waiting at a restaurant, resist pulling out technology to quell their boredom and try this game!
“Guess My Number” is a simple, fun, easy, and educational game for kids 7 and up that you can play anywhere that you have pen and paper. It’s a flexible game, and can be easily adapted for young elementary aged children or your middle school math whizzes. I played it often with my fourth graders and they always loved it.
Teachers: this is a game that almost any child in any level in your upper-grade class can happily and confidently participate in. Parents: this is a great anywhere-game that will engage their minds in a way that is really fun for them while working their mathematical brains– parenting WIN!
I once observed a teacher leading a large class of students. I could tell she didn’t have much experience teaching for a number of reasons, but one of the most obvious was that she kept getting derailed. A lot. She would be mid-sentence when a kid would suddenly shoot their hand in the air. It caught her off-guard with the urgency of a text message, and she took the bait every time. Even if she was working toward a main point, she allowed the hand to slice her words mid-sentence as she responded, “–Yes?”
The urgent hand waving in the air won her attention, and eventually, everyone else’s. After a series of similar interruptions, she soon lost the interest of all of the students and spent the rest of the lesson struggling to get it back (unsuccessfully). It was a disaster.
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I had just started teaching a new group of students for Sunday school. After I introduced myself to the students, I immediately insisted on hand-raising. One kid rolled his eyes at me, as if to say, “Really? You’re going to make us do this?”
I shot him the look. He raised his hand.
I mean, I kind of get it. There were only six kids in the class that day– was this really necessary?
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