Using Holidays to Increase Student Engagement

All teachers want their students to be engaged in learning. Students increase their attention skills and motivation to learn when they are engaged. There are different ways to increase their engagement.

This week we are going to chat about how to measure engagement and how to have a little fun during the holidays increasing our students’ engagement levels. Let’s get started.

Measuring Student Engagement

We want highly engaged students, but how do we actually know when they are highly engaged? This part is simple…if you pay attention. Here are a few obvious signs that your students are not motivated or are disengaged in what you are teaching:

They are looking around the room at everything but you.
They are not asking questions or have no answer when you ask them one.
Assessment scores are low.

Engaged students should be:

curious and want to know more about a subject
interacting with you and with their peers
volunteering to help in the classroom

Next, let’s look at a few ways to use Valentine’s Day to increase student engagement.

Holiday Engagement

Holiday games are a fun way for your students to interact with each other. They can also provide movement activities during a yucky winter. Use large hearts taped to the floor for a Twister-like game.

Candy hearts can be sorted and graphed to help build graphing and data-collection skills. If you think your students will be too engaged in that lesson, they are pretty tasty 😉, then keep reading for some cute heart erasers to use instead. You can also add word problems to a math station using the hearts as a manipulative. Check out this post on word problems for ideas.

Online Student Engagement

As I’ve mentioned before, digital math lessons are also great to include in your math centers. Here are two that bring some fun into the classroom for Valentine’s Day but will also teach counting and addition skills. Kindergarteners will love to count sweets in this one! In addition, extend learning by including math mats with Valentine counters that match the digital resource.

If you are still teaching virtually, these Google Slides resources can be easily used by your students for some learning fun! This resource has 2^nd graders adding sweets for their own Valentine fun!

Next, is another list for you this week. It’s probably why you clicked on this post, and it’s a very important part of teaching.

How to increase engagement:

Let students make choices
Use hands-on learning (Here’s a great read on that topic)
Give students purpose
Above all, make learning fun

And, with that one being said, let’s take advantage of holidays to increase our student engagement!

Holidays provide teachers with kind of a “break” in the daily routine of learning. They allow us to spiff things up a bit. Children, especially young ones, get excited when decorations start to go up. Valentine’s Day allows teachers to use the holiday for extended learning. Students practice handwriting skills when they write out Valentine cards for their classmates. But you can also use the holiday for fun math learning.

Everybody Loves Amazon

If you’ve read a few posts here on the blog, you probably know I love to give my readers reasons to shop…and eat yummy treats. (Remember the Target post? 😉 ) So, this week I’m sending you to Amazon. Yes, the place where everybody ends up going down the rabbit hole.

For example, I found some really cute counting items that you can use to add some fun to your lessons. (Disclaimer: These are affiliate links, and I do receive a small referral fee for each purchase. You aren’t charged a higher price, and I do appreciate your support! Thank you!)

First, red bingo chips. Nothing says Valentine’s Day like having the color red spread throughout your classroom. These fun bingo chips can be used in your math centers for hands-on learning.

In addition, here are these cuties: Smile heart erasers. I love Valentine hearts with faces on them. So do the students. They add a little fun to lessons, think higher engagement, that may not be everyone’s favorite lesson to participate in.

I didn’t set out to include another way to use a tasty treat in learning this week, but how can anyone not include candy hearts in a Valentine post? Right? 😉

So this week, let’s engage with our students, shop Amazon, and buy some Valentine hearts. I will talk to you next week! How do you not come back to read next week’s blog…😊

Jess @ Savvy Apple