There are few things as meaningful and fulfilling as teaching children. Whether you are the parent, family, or teacher, the joy of helping mold a young mind, not to mention its importance to the child’s development, cannot be overstated. What we want to do as teachers is provide an environment that will bring out the best in the children. One of the challenges of teachers is to make this environment interesting to the child so that their education is enhanced. Lets examine some ways in which this is accomplished.
Teaching Children – Getting Creative
Often when children walk into the classroom they have a certain expectation. They are most likely accustomed to a certain environment that they can come to expect to see each and every day. Things are generally all in the place as the day before and the day before that. As a child cast his gaze around the room, it is likely that the same students are seated in the same seats. When the teacher begins the start of the class, the child is expecting a certain typical beginning. This is the environment a child has came to expect. There is a certain sense of constancy which in some ways can provide a degree of security, but by and large this sense of ordinary is creating a large sense of dullness and boredom can slip into the mainstream of the child feelings and reactions.
A teacher can address this problem as an opportunity because that is really what it is. Sometimes its best to shake things up to elicit a certain reaction from the children. This is not what the children will expect, but this is exactly what you want to do because when all the neurons of the brain are firing due to some unexpected event….a heightened sense of expectation….some pretty amazing things can happen. It is thought that creating an environment that activates the child’s attention and/or imagination can do wonders for their ability to attend to the lesson at hand and to learn and retain information more efficiently.
Adopting this approach on occasion will not only stimulate the children in a positive way, but it will also charge up the teacher to become more animated with what they are about to do or perform. And yes, sometimes what we might try to do in the classroom is similar to a performance. Whether its the teacher doing impersonations as a method to garner greater attention to the subject matter or having the children perform, some very meaningful results can be achieved. One only needs to get out of the box and inject some creative fun in the classroom.