[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 1 | January 4, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]
The New Year is a wonderful time to start trying some new things. You’ve spent a good amount of time with your students and feel more comfortable exploring new strategies and practices that are more tailored to their learning needs. I want to share some great ideas that you can use to change things up for the second part of the year — and that can also help beat the winter blues.
Student Interest Project
A great way to bring energy back into a classroom is to let students have more say in what’s going on in the class. One way to do that is by giving them an opportunity to research a topic that interests them. This doesn’t have to be a very long process, but it could turn into something much larger if you want. Just giving students the time to look up things of interest and share out with the class is a great way to develop their research and speaking skills. If you want to go the extra yard, have the students blog about their research. This gives them the opportunity to read and comment on their classmates’ blogs as well. Young people are always excited to share things that they find interesting, so taking class time to validate what they care about can go a long way toward building strong student-teacher relationships.