How to Keep Children Interested in Learning through Interactive Methods

There are many ways you can teach children, but if you really want them to take an active part in learning rather than just memorising facts or numbers, then the best way to do this is through interactive learning.

Interactive lessons eliminate one-way communication or individualised instruction in favour of engaging students in the material. These lessons allow students to understand what they are learning on a deeper level, making them more successful and useful.

Studying through interactive methods is one of the best ways to get learning motivation. But if you lack it and still need to deal with your assignments, there is a way out. For example, you can use an essay generator free to deal with writing quicker or get help with your tasks at special helping services or forums.

The best teaching methods

There are different creative ways to teach children:

• Teacher-student interaction
• Student-to-student interaction
• Using audio and video
• Demonstrations and hands-on learning

You encourage children to be active members of your learning and to think for themselves, which leads to long-term retention of information. Not only does the students’ knowledge improve, but so does their interest, strength, team spirit, and freedom of expression.

Here are ideas, tools, and games that will make your lessons interactive and improve the quality of learning.

They can be roughly divided into the following categories:

• Stimulating communication and feedback from students
• Individual learning activities
• Pair activities
• Group activities

Interactive learning techniques to stimulate communication and feedback from students

The three most effective ways to encourage students to talk more and give feedback during class are the following:

Pair work: discuss – share

Give a problem or question about a certain topic and pair up your students. Give each pair enough time to come to the right conclusion, and let your students share their opinions. This way, they will be actively involved and will remember more about the lesson than ever before.

Brainstorming

Interactive brainstorming is done in group classes. This process is useful for generating creative thoughts and ideas. You will be surprised by all the great thoughts they come up with! To structure your students’ ideas, use mind mapping services. One of the best learning apps for this is MindMeister.

Discussion

Participants form discussion groups that focus on one topic. In every group, each participant shares their thoughts and ideas. Encourage discussion and collaboration between students in every group. They should learn from each other’s experiences. As a teacher, you can give your students a few keywords to spark conversation.

Individual learning activities

Poll

A poll is one of the fun educational activities for kids that is best used at the end of a lesson. Ask students to write down a one-minute answer to a specific question. For example: “What is the most important thing you learned today?” You can then start the conversation with this in the next lesson. You can ask students if they still remember what they wrote down.

Misconception check

Identify misconceptions that students have. See if they can figure out the right answer when presented with a false fact. This is useful for reinforcing the previous lesson, and it also encourages students to think deeply and retain the material better.

Circle the question

Create a checklist or quiz with a list of questions about your topic and ask students to circle (or mark) the ones they don’t know the answers to. Create assignments for the different questions that were circled. Have your students work on additional exercises and explanations for these tasks individually. Since all your students will circle different questions, you should give each of them their own individual set of assignments.

Ask the “A” student

Ask students to silently solve a problem or answer a question. After receiving the answer, ask those who did it correctly to raise their hands (if the lesson is held offline) or write about it in the chat (if you are teaching an online lesson). Then, all the other students should talk to someone who has coped with the task in order to better understand the essence and avoid making mistakes next time.

Pair activities

Find a partner and share

After sharing and discussing the experiences described above in the first point, ask students to find a new partner and share with them the conclusions and realisations that occurred in the previous partnership with another student.

Teacher and student

Have students discuss the main points of the lesson. Then, divide them into pairs and assign them two roles: teacher and student. The teacher’s job is to jot down the main points. The student’s job is to cross off the items on their list as mentioned and come up with 2-3 items the teacher missed.

Share your partner’s results

After the individual creative activity, divide students into pairs to share their results. Then, give the floor to volunteers who found their partner’s work interesting or exemplary. Students are often more willing to share their classmates’ work publicly than their own. You can gently lead them to share their findings and perhaps even the results of their work.

Group activities

Educational video games

In groups, students discuss educational video games that use a concept discussed in class, trying to identify at least one way the filmmakers got it right and one way they got it wrong. Think about movies that feature historical and geographical facts, biographies of famous people, etc.