Creative Ideas for Making the Classroom a More Exciting Place of Learning

MISAMIS ORIENTAL GENERAL COMPREHENSIVE HIGH SCHOOL

It’s not easy holding the attention of a class of 40 or more students. It’s not easy encouraging them to their time inside the classroom, especially during class hours. Most of them have short attention spans mainly because of the effects of technology and its sub-culture (i.e. social media or the Internet in general).

This is why a lot of teachers are challenged and need to come up with creative (and innovative) ideas to make classrooms an interesting and exciting place or learning. They need to constantly think of ways that will prevent students from getting bored.

There are several strategies, however, that teachers can use to spice things up inside the classroom. Here are some of them:

1. For spelling and vocabulary: Use cut-out cartolinas or boards for writing down spelling and vocabulary words. Choose those that can be used to form several sentences. Ask the students to form sentences using the boards. The more sentences they make, the higher their points.

Also, do not forget to assign a sound for each punctuation mark that will be used (example: “Cling, cling cling!” for the period and “Splak!” for exclamation point). The students must use the correct punctuation mark sound in their sentences to get a point.

2. For teaching the importance of unity and cooperation: Play an activity called “Factory”. Students should be divided into groups of 10-15. Assign a product (example: milk, chocolates, and car) to each team – make sure the teams do not know what items were assigned to the others. When everyone is ready, instruct them to use their bodies to create a factory machine for their product.

Let the teams guess each others’ products.

3. For reading and storytelling classes: Write 10-15 random items on the board and ask each student to use all these to write a good story. For example: Items – banana, red car, house on the hill, moon, dog, and red ribbon. Story: Last night, when the moon was at its brightest, I saw my brother go out of our house. Someone driving a red car picked him up. I ran to the kitchen where my mom was busy wrapping a banana cake in gold paper and red ribbon. I told her about what I saw but she just smiled at me and said, “I know where your brother is going. He’s visiting a friend who lives on that old house on the hill.” I was curious about the house so I decided that I’d visit it tonight. I won’t be going alone though because my dog Candy will be with me.

Give the student with the most creative and well-written story the highest grade.

4. To help make difficult topics easier to understand, let the students role play. Ask them to create a story that will help explain the topic better. For example, in economics, the history of money.

All these creative activities are quite simple to do. They may require your additional time and extra effort but if you’re dedicated to helping make your students’ learning experience in the classroom more fun and exciting, you won’t mind the hard work.