Effective Teaching and Learning
2
Starter Activities
Beginning a lesson with a whizz and a bang is somewhat of a mystery to those of us still grappling with the snail-slow pace of the Ingeris registration system. Students are often left tapping pens and chatting about last night's latest episode of [insert latest teen programme craze title here]. So, here are a few ideas to spark their interest in the lesson whilst we are all cursing the inconvenience of slow technology to ourselves ...
1) Use images
Show students a selection of images/cartoons and get them to explain which relates to last lesson's learning and how t the others might tie in later.
2) Guess Who!
Place the theme/topic/focus of the lesson on the whiteboard. Put students into pairs and hand out a wad of post-it notes to each pair. They write a word or statement relating to the lesson and put it on their partner's head. Their partner then has to guess who or what they are.
3) Explain Statements
Put students into groups of three and number them one to three. Put three numbered statements on the board and ask students to explain their corresponding statement to the others.
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High Impact Plenaries
After the excitement of a lesson in which students have been contributing enthusiastically and soaking up all the knowledge you wanted them to, bringing the lesson to a close can be more of a token gesture homework noting exercise rather than something which consolidates the learning. Here are three ways of ending your lesson that need no preparation ... bonus!
1) Key Word Pictionary
Split class into 2 teams and split the w/b in half by drawing a line down the middle. One member of each team comes to the w/b, the teacher shows them both the same word to be drawn. The students draw the word in their half of the w/b and the first team to call out the correct word wins a point (it doesn't matter if they are looking at both students' drawings). Repeat.
2)Topic Tennis
Pupils should be in threes. The teacher names a topic. Two pupils take it in turns to say words relating to the topic (like word association except words don't have to directly associate to each other, just to the topic), they keep going until one person can't go. The third pupil notes down the words. These are then fed back as a whole class. This can introduce an new unit or be used as revision. It can also be scored (out loud by the third pupil) as a game of tennis, hence the name – good for PE.
Some fresh ideas to spice things up