Teaching Elementary Students

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Teaching Elementary Students

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Teaching elementary students is far different from teaching middle school students or high school students or college students – although, some of the rules that apply to teaching elementary students could apply to these other groups. For teaching elementary students, sometimes the facts themselves are not nearly as interesting as the ways in which they are presented.

As a teacher, you can get up and lecture about American history or about English, etc., but if you really want your kids to remember what you are teaching, it helps to do something supplemental, as well.

For instance, if you are teaching about the Civil War, you can come to school dressed up as General E. Lee. Or, after studying about slavery and the Civil War, you can have your students write an essay about what it might have felt like to be a slave. Or, you can go out into the fields and stage your own mini Civil War battle. You could dress up one of the students as Abraham Lincoln and have him give his famous “Four score and seven years ago” speech.

There are many things that you can incorporate into teaching elementary students that can make it more interesting and therefore more memorable to students. Also, having the students write an essay, for instance, really helps students exercise other parts of their brain. School is not just about learning facts, it is about gaining tools to use later in life – ways of thinking, etc.

Another idea that is good for when you are teaching elementary students is to have a theme. You can have a theme for the entire day, or just for a certain subject. For instance, maybe your theme is animals. You can read a story about animals like Charlotte’s Web, write a story about animals, have story problems about animals for math, learn about the impacts that animals have made in history, sing about animals, draw animals, etc. etc. You may even choose not to tell your students that there is a theme and see if they can guess what it is at the end of the day.

Another good idea is to use hands-on experience as often as you can when teaching elementary students. Not all students are simply visual learners. And if students are taught things in multiple ways that applies to all of their senses, they are more likely to retain the information longer. Instead of just having your students practice addition and subtraction with a pencil and paper, cover a table with shaving cream, spread it out, and let the students write their math problems with their fingers in the shaving cream.

As you can see, there are many different ways to go about teaching elementary students. It is most important to make sure that when you are teaching elementary students you make your lessons as memorable as possible – dress-up, have a theme, use hands-on methods. It is also important that you involve the students, as a group and individually as often as possible. Teaching elementary students is not simply about getting up at a podium and talking on and on – it is about seeing what the students thing, finding out how individual students learn and need to be taught, and more.

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