Are Your Kids Stress Free at School

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Are Your Kids Stress Free at School

• The greatest weapon against stress is our ability
  to choose one thought over another.
• There are a myriad ways of making our classes
  efficient and motivational, yet fun. As teaching
  is such a complex skill, with so many factors to
  consider, its very difficult to narrow it down
  to just a few ideas.

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1. Establish a Routine and Rules from the First
Class

• With pre-school or lower-primary children,
  setting up a classroom routine is as important as
  any other element of your class. Once routines
  are carefully established, children know what we
  expect of them. A well-chosen routine can save
  valuable class time, help with discipline, and
  allow you to spend more time on meaningful
  instruction.
• Its important to establish a clear routine from
  Day 1. Simple routines like a Hello and a Goodbye
  song to mark the start and end of English time,
  and different ways of controlling transitions
  between activities like using songs or chants to
  signal a change from story time to table-time are
  important in pre-school and early primary
  classes. Younger children love it when their
  lives are predictable. The best way to capitalize
  on this is to build a routine into your classes,
  making life easier for you too.

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• The reason why children at this stage love
  routines is because they do not have a developed
  concept of time and they measure their time in
  school by the activities they do at set times in
  the school day.
• With older children you might have a lesson
  negotiating classroom rules where they volunteer
  behaviors which they think will help to make the
  classroom a happier place and to help them get
  the most out of lessons. You will often be
  impressed and surprised with some of their ideas
  like treating each other with respect, always
  doing their best work and handing homework in on
  time! You can then make a list of their rules and
  even get everyone, including you, to sign it.
  Make photocopies of the list for everyone to
  stick inside their books and you can enlarge it
  to display somewhere in the classroom.

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2. Use Variety

• Although chocolate is delicious and many of us
  could happily eat it every day, we would soon
  become bored with a diet of chocolate. Why?
  Because it would no longer be a novelty. We would
  actually start to feel sick of it! The same can
  true of any classroom activity. A favorite
  activity can be fun and educational, but if we do
  it in the same way every day and only do that
  type of activity, it can become boring. We know
  that different children learn in different ways
  and that different activities cater for their
  needs in English. Stories provide children with
  input, as do songs, rhymes and chants. Play,
  drama and well-chosen games help them internalize
  language and use it to communicate. However,
  there are many other activities children enjoy
  that help them learn language and we should
  exploit them to full advantage.
• While making things, children also make meaning.
  As they explore shapes, colors, textures,
  constructions, they are extending their
  experience and understanding of the world.

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3. Have Fun

• Creating fun in the classroom does not mean that
  the children have to be on the go constantly or
  that you, the teacher, have to be the all singing
  all dancing entertainer. Fun can be created in
  many ways singing, stories, quizzes, chants,
  games, acting out The list is endless. Believe
  it or not, one of the students favorite games is
  the List Game, where they choose 6 topics, which
  the teacher writes on the board and number from
  one to six, each number corresponding to the
  sides of a dice. The children get into teams. One
  team throws the dice and all the teams have 3
  minutes to write a list of words from that topic.
  They have as much fun with this game as with a
  running dictation.

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4. There needs to be Language Pay-off

• While its important to make learning fun for
  young learners, in the limited amount of time we
  have for English, we need to make sure that there
  is what is called as language pay-off in every
  activity. When preparing a game or any other
  activity, it is important to be clear about the
  language and learning objectives. We can
  sometimes get carried away when we see our
  students having fun, however we must be sure that
  there is enough language learning going on to
  justify the activity.
• Monitoring is most important during communicative
  group activities. Children find an award very
  motivational, e.g. a gold star for the table
  using the most English, or you could give the
  table not using enough English an Untrophy.

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5. Music and Movement

• The dictionary defines music as an art of sound
  in time that expresses ideas and emotions through
  elements of rhythm, melody, harmony and color.
• Music has unique qualities and a well-chosen song
  or piece of music can provide language learning
  benefits from Pre-Primary all the way up to the
  end of Primary, providing the children with
  useful language input that can be fun at the same
  time. If the children leave your classroom
  singing an English song in their head they will
  carry it with them all day and at home too,
  something Tim Murphy referred to as S-S-I-T-H-P
  Song Stuck in the Head Phenomenon.
• As teachers, we can also rest assured that by
  using music, song, movement, and all the other
  activities involved in the musical process, we
  are addressing most (if not all) the Basic Skills
  and Key competences.
• Remember that, of the many factors that
  influence learning, few are as far-reaching or
  little understood as sound and music.

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6. Surprise Them

• To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to
  understand.
• One thing the children really like is when you
  sometimes let them choose the order of your
  class. I tell them what we are going to do but
  ask them what they would like to come first,
  second, etc. I dont do this too often or it is
  no longer a surprise!
• Turn song time into a karaoke competition.
• Bring props for your story and hide them in a
  bag, inviting different children to feel and
  guess whats inside and then using them to act
  out the story.

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• Present a song as a letter to the children. Let
  them read and work on the letter, asking who they
  think sent it, whether they are happy, sad, etc.
  Then surprise them by playing the song at the
  end. Try the Beatles Love me do as a
  Valentines letter or Louis Armstrongs
  Wonderful world for Peace Day but remember
  you can only do this once or twice in a year or
  it will no longer be a surprise!
• Try doing even the most familiar things in a
  different way. Instead of making a list of words,
  let them create a mind map.

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• When the children write sentences encourage them
  to do color parsing, for example using the colors
  of traffic lights, writing the pronoun in red,
  the verb in yellow and the noun in green. This
  will make the sentence more memorable and can
  help with corrections. Instead of referring to
  nouns, verbs, etc, you could say for example
  The red words are he/she and it. Have a look at
  your yellow words. Whats missing? Good, the
  s.
• Dont always ask the children to write on a blank
  page but instead investigate the use of graphic
  organizers.
• Let them present their writing in the form of a
  shaped book, for example, or write their food
  poem on a paper plate.

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7. Praise

• We all like positive feedback and respond well to
  recognition of a job well done. Most small
  children want to please their teachers and love
  any positive attention you show them. Try to
  praise the children for any effort on their part,
  whether it is using English or being the first to
  follow one of your instructions. Praise good
  behavior and you will find many of the children
  trying to copy.
• Know that people will forget what you said,
  people will forget what you did, but people will
  never forget how you made them feel.

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8. Evaluate Fairly

• Teachers often feel that they are at times
  obsessed by testing children. Try to view tests
  as just part of the teaching and learning
  process, as you need to be regularly, but not
  constantly, assessing the childrens progress in
  order to make sure you are catering to their
  educational needs. However, a quick rule of thumb
  over testing is that a test needs to be valid.
  This means that we should test what the children
  have learnt. We also need to take care over how
  they have learnt it. You may think this is
  obvious but we should not use a new activity type
  in a test. I saw a teacher give the children a
  dictation in a test when they had never done one
  in class!

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9. Try to be Enthusiastic, Even if you Sometimes
Dont Feel like it

• It can be difficult to remain enthusiastic all
  the time but when a teacher enters the class
  smiling and seems enthusiastic about an activity
  they are presenting, they will find it much
  easier to captivate their class. Hiding your
  flashcards in a bag, peeping inside and asking
  the children to guess what is inside will get
  their attention a lot quicker than putting up the
  flashcards and getting them to repeat the words.
  That element of surprise adds to their
  enthusiasm.

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10. Stay motivated you

• Update your skills from time to time sign up for
  some training. Its always good to feel what its
  like to be a student again. You can learn so
  many new things in one day and maybe a speaker
  will remind you of an activity you already knew
  but havent used in a while. You can even try to
  use sessions you dont particularly like as a
  learning experience to realize what some students
  in your class may be feeling if you havent made
  your class fun, relevant or interesting to them.
• Remember also to make sure that you have some YOU
  time outside school. As the old saying goes a
  little bit of what you fancy does you good.
  Whether its taking your own children to the park
  and having fun, going swimming, texting a friend
  or skiing down a mountain, you need to have a
  rest for your own sanity.

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ThankYou

• Kalvi International Public School
• 134, A R Hospital Road,
• KK Nagar,
• Madurai 625020
• Email ID helpdesk_at_kalvigroup.com
• Website https//kalvischools.com/
• Ph no 91-9500710004