Photo from Weebly
Education and entertainment have a long-standing relationship that doesn’t always go hand in hand. Some people argue that fun education isn’t serious enough or serious education isn’t fun enough. It’s about finding the right balance for your students. At first glance, it may seem that education and entertainment are just too different. The goal of education is to teach knowledge, responsibility, and maturity. The goal of entertainment is to have fun and amuse. Just because they are different does not mean that they cannot be used together.
Hands-on Learning
Making a lesson hands-on is a great way to get the students involved and it makes learning fun. Hands-on learning can be anything from science experiments to cooking, role-playing to fieldwork. Teaching from a book is one thing but not every student can learn effectively in that manner. Many of us learn better from active learning. Getting dug in and actually conducting experiments ourselves helps us to understand how they work in a much more visual and kinetic manner than just reading it from a whiteboard or book. This is the same for students of all ages, incorporating variety into your teaching will make lessons more fun and help your students to understand better than if you just stick to one method.
Warm-Ups and Cooldowns
In a lot of ways our brains are like muscles, they need to be exercised to stay in tip-top form. However, just like if you’ve been for a long run and your legs get tired – if you’ve been studying hard your brain gets tired. It’s important to introduce warm ups and cool downs into your lesson plans. The warm-ups will help to get students brains in gear for learning, these should be fun activities that prepare them for the class ahead. “The cooldowns should give them an opportunity to wind down, have a chat about what they have learned and relax. This can be at break time or at the end of a class. The students will thank you for it and so will the teachers in their next lesson,” adds Thomas Hagedorn, freelance educational writer at Australia2write.
Stay Relevant
Many teachers feel alienated from their students. This can be due to differences in culture and interests. How many times have you thought “What is Fortnite?” or cursed the existence of fidget spinners. Whatever the latest trend is you’re bound to hear of it in the classroom. It might grate on you, it will distract from the topic in hand but that’s where you can come in. By staying relevant, keeping up to date with all the latest trends that your students are likely to go through you can bring that knowledge into the classroom in a constructive way. A normal math question is probably not going to get your student’s to be very attentive. However, if you make that maths question about the latest game or TV show, suddenly they’re listening. The class is more fun and you can use that excitement surrounding the trend to create an entertaining and educational lesson.
Make Use of Technology
Your students have likely grown up surrounded by technology. They’re used to it and they love to use it. Bringing technology into the classroom is a fantastic way to combine education with entertainment in a way that your students will be familiar with. “Also, we have access to a whole horde of information on the internet, make the most of it. For example, you can find videos on YouTube that relate to your lesson plan to get your class engaged and interested in the topic,” adds James Faulkner, a regular contributor to Brit Student.
Education Can be Fun
The more you can use learning methods which they can relate to, the more fun they are going to have while they are learning. The more fun they have while they’re learning, the more they’re going to want to learn and absorb the information you’re teaching them.