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Hello, I am a student over at FIU, and my biggest concern is online engagement. How can I get my kindergarten students to be more talkative? I've tried paring the students up and working as a group but when I go and check on them, I see no talk. I really like this new way of teaching and I think it is important to continue to include this new remote teaching into zoom. Any ideas?
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Hi,I work with VPK and similar to what the previous reply said the best why to get them to interact in my experience is to have movement and fun activities. For example last week we were working on the letter S and we had student prepare sandwishes to eat during class. They shared what they had in their sandwishes and once they break the ice with talking once at least during class they get more comfortable with doing it again later on during class. We have one student be the weather reporter everyday so they take a moment to go to their window and come back to share with the class what the weather is like today. We have really fun or silly question of the day and when they answer you can ask them to explain their answer. We've had parents buy some basic craft materials like paper, glue, crayons, paper plates so children do art projects and share through the screen to their friends what they made.
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Hi Helen,
I am currently a VPK teacher implementing a Kindergarten curriculum in my classroom. Half of my students are virtual while the other half are present in person, so I am familiar with issues regarding virtual student engagement. I found the best methods for engagement involve including movement. Many of these students are very young and lose interest and focus quickly having to sit for long periods of time at a computer. By including movement with your virtual students it will likely increase engagement. For example, I was teaching my students the sh, ch, th digraphs. I told my virtual kids to go on a three minute scavenger hunt in there home and find one item that begins with sh, ch, or th. This increases their engagement a ton! I hope this helps.
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Hi Helen,
I actually work with 2nd graders fully in person this fall, but in the past, I was a student teacher for 4th and 2nd grades which both grades spent time online. It was so hard for me and my cooperating teacher to get the kids engaged when they were doing online coursework. When they were doing online learning at home, they had other things on their mind and school was far from being on their mind. I couldn't imagine trying to get kindergarten students more engaged. What finally worked for my CT and I was that we did a whole group ice breaker activity and did breakout room group activities throughout the online class duration to get the kids excited about school again. Our students loved doing the ice breaker class activity because they were able to interact with their friends and peers even though they were online and not with them in person. Students became more excited to learn and talked about class more than before we tried to change how we did online teaching. It may seem pointless to do in the beginning, but in the long-run, fun and quirky activities to do online are a great tool to use to get students more engaged and to get them to enjoy learning again, even if it is online.
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