While
teaching I have come to realize just how short young children’s attention spans
can be and how much energy they can have. On days where I work with the six and
seven year old children for hours at a time I have a really hard time
maintaining their attention. Now that I write this it seems obvious that
children have a hard time focusing in class for hours on end, I sometimes have
trouble focusing for 50 minutes during my college classes. I have begun to try
different methods of keeping my class interesting enough to maintain the
attention of these children.
One
of the first things that I started to do was trying to engage all of the
students in the lesson. This is harder when the class has thirty to forty
students. I began calling on each student in the class in a systematic manner.
For example when practicing pronunciation I would have the class repeat the
word after me together and I would then call on each student individually to
pronounce the word. This is only sometimes affective because the students that
are not being called on become bored.
I
then tried bringing a couple of students in front of the class to practice with
each other. I would chose two or three students to practice vocabulary words we
had learned, or have conversations with each other. The students enjoy this,
but I have the same problem of calming the students that are not currently
participating in the practice.
I
have also tried incorporating songs into the learning process. We have sung
simple songs to practice vocabulary and pronunciation. These seem to work well
except that when the class sings together it is difficult to hear the
individual students and recognize who may need additional help. I didn’t
realize how hard it was to teach until I started trying to teach. It is really
fun, but definitely takes practice and experience. I have become better at
interacting with young children and connecting with them.
No comments:
Post a Comment