Developing trust and respect with your new class!

Thinking about your style of engagement is an important part of your teaching practise. When planning your lessons, it is important to gain the children’s interest at the very start and try to begin every session with a ‘wow’ factor or a key question to get them involved.

This can be done across all of the curriculum areas that you teach. It’s important to think about how you approach the following:

• The first lesson in the PE unit on Dance
• The starter for introducing the class novel
• An introduction to ‘Rivers’ or ‘The Tudors’
• Outlining what data handling is
  

All of the above can start with something that is VAK (Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic).

Examples of this could be showing the children real objects such as a clip from YouTube or a question about what they know about the rivers of the world.

Have the children create a mini mind-map of what they know about dance, what they enjoy and if they dance outside of the classroom – many do, and many have lessons and may even take exams and get certificates!

“Gain their ideas and lead a class discussion. Use your support staff to annotate the ideas and key points from the conversation.”

Get to know all of this and then use it to adjust and plan further lessons and experiences. From this you can also ask the children to bring in anything they have at home that relates and build in time to look at these and have the children share their experiences in the classroom.

This is great for speaking and listening exercises as children listen to one another much better and with greater concentration than they do with adults!

Use children to teach children as a fun and exciting way to teach and to learn!