Teaching Ideas for Elementary Education

Get your elementary schools focused on learning.

Elementary educators are charged with the difficult task of teaching students the basic academic lessons that they will need for later-in-life academic success. To ensure that your attempts to teach these young and precocious pupils prove successful, you should integrate a variety of teaching methods into your classroom. By doing so, you can maximize the effectiveness of your elementary teaching efforts and increase the likelihood that all of your students learn the requisite lessons.

Multilevel Libraries

Even though your elementary classroom is likely filled with students at the same grade level, in all likelihood, these students' reading abilities will still differ greatly. To ensure that all of your pupils have access to literature at their ability levels, create a multilevel library. Gather books at your students' grade level as well as some slightly above and slightly below this level. Develop a color code to mark the books, labeling the easiest books with red by placing a red dot sticker on the spine, the at-grade level books with yellow and the above with green. As you assess students and discover their individual reading ability levels, encourage students to select books of certain colors, or deliver appropriately difficult books to them.

Cross-Curricular Lessons

Although you likely have time set aside in your day for each of the major subjects that your students must learn, there is no reason to keep each subject separate. Whenever possible mix the subjects by creating cross-curricular lessons. As you learn about a historical event, engage your students in reading a book about that event in reading. Similarly, as you study a scientific phenomenon, integrate this phenomenon into math study. By doing so, you can show your students that all of the subjects that they are learning are actually part of the same body of knowledge and not separate and distinct, as it might seem to them.

Inquiry Days

Although you certainly must tell students what they need to learn most of them time, allowing them to guide their own learning on occasion is an effective way to get them more engaged in the learning process and encourage them to become lifelong learners. Set aside several days each month to serve as inquiry days. Begin each inquiry day by asking students to come up with questions that they would like to discover the answer to. Allow students to volunteer these questions, and write them on the board. Divide students into groups, and allow each group to select one student-posed question. Provide students access to digital and print resources, and allow them to look up the answer to the posed query. At the conclusion of the day, give students time to share their findings with their peers.

Student-Lead Lessons

Let your students take a walk in your shoes by periodically having student-lead lessons. Create a list of subjects that students could successfully introduce to the class, and allow each student to sign up for one of these topics. Assign students dates on which they will present their lessons, and provide them with some information on their assigned topics. As the dates for student-lead lessons roll around, allow each student to take center stage and teach his class as you normally do, giving each pupil the opportunity to be an expert, at least for a day.

References

• "ReadingRockets"; The Six Ts of Effective Elementary Literacy Instruction; Richard Allington; 2002
• Thirteen: Inquiry-based Learning: Explanation