Providing engaging learning in your classroom can be exciting and enhance learning. As we all know, holding a students attention can be challenging at times. On the blog Day2Day Parenting it suggest that a child’s attention span is as long as their age. So, how do we hold their attention by providing exciting and engaging lessons.
Engagement in the classroom
First, try involving the students in something they haven’t experienced in school. A great engaging activity is to have a glow party using learning centers for math. You ask how do I do this? It is very easy and if you are lucky enough to get it funded through Donors Choose even better!
Setting Up for Engagement
To set the stage to engage, I put up the glow sign while the students were in gym. Then I put out the black lights. I had three long black lights and two roles of lights with sticky backs. Then I placed the centers around the room. The students rotated to each center every 10 minutes.
Engaging Learning Centers
The first center was greater and less then. Students picked cards with numbers and used pipe cleaners to make greater and less than signs. The pipe cleaners worked best cut in half. The next center was picture graphs with neon Pom Poms. The student had a sheet to place the poms on and then another sheet to answer questions about their graphs.
The third center was the fact families centers. Students picked a paper with three numbers to make a fact family. They used highlighters and regular papers in this learning center. The fourth center was making two dimensional shapes with pipe cleaners. The students could look at a chart if they forgot some of the shapes.
The last two centers were the measurement center and the place value center. For the measure center I used neon poster board and made different lengths of strips. Then they recorded their answers on a seperate sheet. The next center was the place value center. I used base ten blocks I already had in the class. The students made numbers and wrote them on a sheet. They also wrote them in exspanded form.
The students had a great time. It took around an hour to rotate through the centers. There were no discipline problems because they were so engaged in their activities. Below are pictures of the materials used. If you click on them or on a picture above it will take you where you can order the supplies. It is an affiliate link. You get it for the same price and it helps me pay off my students loans.