Listen to Your Students

I've learned quite a bit over the last few weeks, but, unfortunately, I haven't had the time to blog about my lessons.

One, in particular, stands out:  Listen to your students!

At the beginning of last week, I began working with my students on narrative writing.  We constructed a "Happy Alien" together as a pre-writing strategy that gets all of our thoughts down in a graphic organizer in order to help us keep our actual paper organized and easier to write.

The prompt put the student in the role of a teacher for the day.  It asks what "you" would do for activities, how "you" would enforce rules, etc.

When it came down to the activities, my students said, "Hands-on!  We don't do a lot of that now, so I would do lots of hands-on activities."

I was a little taken aback because I felt that I was pretty balanced in my classroom when it came to differentiated instruction, and I felt that I utilized all of the learning styles.

Then, it hit me:  Perhaps, what I consider "hands-on", or kinesthetic, doesn't match their definition.

From then on, I've been trying to incorporate more activities that include movement, using your hands, etc.  For example, last week, I invited the students to the SmartBoard to participate in two online activities that I found that went along with what I was teaching in Science.  They created their own volcanoes and earthquakes right there on the SmartBoard.  They really seemed to enjoy these activities and seemed to grasp the difference between the two and how they come to be.

So...  I learned a huge lesson.  I need to listen to my students; ask them what they want.  If it's plausible, I will try to include it into my lessons somehow because, as I found out, it really pays off in the end.