In order to ensure that the teaching and learning process is effective, the classes have to be interesting, and the students must feel comfortable and that they are a part of the classroom.
To make sure that students don’t lose interest in the class, you have to incorporate activities for students so that there’s enough interaction in the classroom.
Fun activities for students will help you keep them engaged and as mentioned, the learning would be more effective. Today we will be looking at some group activities for students and activities for students in the classroom that will guarantee interaction and interest.
Without further ado, let’s look at a few activities for students.
15 Activities for Students
1.Simon Says
This activity is fun and engaging and is sure to increase the concentration of your students. The goal of this activity is very simple. Students are to take orders from Simon and ignore any other comments.
How to play:
For instance, if the teacher gives a command “Simon says, stand up”, the whole class should stand up, and if the teacher simply says “sit down” the class should remain standing and anyone who sits loses the game. They should sit only when the command is “Simon says sit down.” This will help to improve concentration and attention and is a fun activity for students.
2. Emotion Cards
Have your students create emotion cards. It can be anything ranging from ‘satisfied’, ‘dissatisfied’, agree’, ‘disagree’, ‘yes’, ‘no’ to anything that would help them describe what they feel about a lesson or a character.
You can then ask them to hold up their emotion card to know where they stand in terms of understanding and learning. This way, the classes become more interactive and interesting.
3. Three points
Towards the end of the lesson, you can ask your students to mention 3 points that they learned from the lesson that day.
This way, they can recollect the lesson and will also ensure that they listen to you while you are teaching. Further, you can give rewards for the best three points that summed up the lesson in the best way.
4. Road Map Puzzle
This is one of the group activities for students that will get them up and moving.
For instance, if you are teaching drama, you can create separate cards with different scenes and you can ask students to split into two teams and arrange the scenes in the correct order.
5. Buzzer Games
Buzzer games are an excellent way to increase interaction in class and also to ensure effective learning.
You can create a set of questions from the lesson and provide buzzers to students. With the rise in online teaching tools, this is very easy to do. This increases retention and is a fun way to analyze how much the students have understood. We have talked about online games for teaching in one of our previous blogs. Check it out here.
6. Debates
Debates are fun activities for students in the classroom. It helps students to engage in healthy competition and to increase their subject knowledge. Debates would also help students to gain more perspective and insights and increase their knowledge altogether. It also ensures interaction and increases the attention of students.
7. Secret Peer Review
When you give an assignment to students, ask them to evaluate it among themselves. Ask them to divide the review into three parts where the first part talks about the assignment in detail, what they understand from it, and how many marks they would give for the effort and the second and third parts about what they would have done differently and mark mistakes if any.
This will make students understand the value of effort. It will also help in increasing the subject matter knowledge.
8. What am I
You can create “what am I” puzzles based on the concepts and lessons that you have dealt with in class. You can then divide them into teams and then ask them to find out what you are talking about. Similarly, you can ask your students to create questions so that they will understand the concepts better.
9. Blind Artist
This game aims to increase the concentration and focus of students. In this activity for students, they have to draw an object completely based on the instructions that you give.
For instance, if you say to draw two circles, the students will have to draw them keeping in mind that they have to create an object with it. Students can also ask doubts such as directions and other queries. This will also help them to be interactive and will take away the fear of raising questions in class.
10. Yikes, you said the word!
This is a memory game wherein the students are given a list of words that they shouldn’t use while talking.
For example, if the words are walking and running and the teacher asks them to talk about five physical activities that they do in daily life, they have to keep in mind to refrain from using that word. The list of words will be big and this will help in increasing the memory of students and also increase focus and concentration.
11. Stand up and sit down
This is one of the most common activities for students in school. When lessons get repetitive and students get bored, this is a very useful and helpful activity. It is very simple and you just ask the students to stand up and sit down. This is extremely helpful during after-lunch hours to get the students energetic and enthusiastic.
12. Tag, you are it (with words)
To start the game, the teacher will give a word and one student will start talking about that word, the teacher will say stop randomly and the next student has to weave a story from the last word that the previous student used. This will help in increasing the creativity of students and help them stay focused.
13. Pass the parcel
This is one of the activities for students in the classroom. Divide the class into two teams. Give one student an object and play some music and ask them to pass it around the whole class. Stop the music randomly and whoever has the parcel gets a chance to ask a question to the opposite team. This way, all students will learn the lesson and will have a healthy competitive attitude.
14. Spin the wheel
You can do this activity after finishing a couple of lessons or just one lesson based on the intensity that you want. Divide the wheel into different lessons and whichever lesson the wheel points at, give the class a task based on that. If you are choosing four different lessons, the class would have to be prepared for those four lessons. This is less intense than a class test and wouldn’t stress the kids out much.
15. Movie Reviews
Movies are a great way to break the boredom in the classroom. You can choose a small movie and watch it along with the students and make your lesson more enjoyable. No matter what subject you teach, you can relate that to a movie. If you are teaching English, then almost all the aspects of the movie will relate to the subject, if you are teaching physics, you can talk about the car chase sequences or so, etc., find where you can fit in your subject and proceed accordingly.
Conclusion
There is more to this list of group activities for students. Different teachers adopt different activities. As a teacher, you have to find activities for students that best suit your classroom. Ultimately, the aim of teachers is to ensure that the students benefit from the lessons discussed in the classroom. How you teach them decides how well they understand the topic.
It is very common for students to lose focus and drift away from the class. These activities for students will help you to stop that. How to improve concentration is a widely discussed topic and there are a lot of tips and tricks that you can employ to improve focus.
If you have any more activities for students, please share them with us through the comments section.
Keep learning, keep growing!
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