Sometimes a homeschool or classroom situation leads to mundane lesson plans and tedious tasks being set for your children to do. This lack of imagination can be detrimental to children’s learning experience. There are plenty of creative teaching solutions that remove this factor from learning experiences that make it as fun for the teacher as it is for the child.
Creative teaching breathes life into lessons that are considered difficult and/or laborious. If you are struggling with homeschool efforts or want to want to bring life into your lesson planning, learning creative teaching solutions is the way to brighten your work.
One of the most creative teaching opportunities is teaching STEM subjects. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Technology. These subjects change the world through incredible designs and creations that influence our lives through a multitude of methods – from technology, medical solutions, to innovate engineering that impacts daily life.
Engineering is something that helps us with modern problems with simple tasks. The feats of engineering are endless and there are creative teaching methods to introduce your children to the incredible opportunities for studying STEM subjects can bring them. Allowing children the creativity and space to critically think allows for some incredible results. Using something as simple as making a tower demonstrates the prowess of engineering skills in your child.
This STEM activity allows children to build towers out of straws and tape. This is a fascinating opportunity to see how their minds work and how they visualise information and structures. Creative teaching allows children to create their own towers but steps in to aid if they need guidance or help at any point. Use bendy straws to give your children more options as they build their towers and see where it takes them.
Depending on how they want their towers to appear aesthetically can be built by the structure or even the colours of the straws that they’ve chosen. One of the creative teaching lessons that they will receive in this type of STEM challenge is that there are sometimes many answers to questions or solutions around problems – it’s simply about perspective.
While this is a STEM challenge that allows children to access their creative faculties, this is also a great way of letting children practice their fine motor skills as they use their hands and fingers to manipulate the straws. This type of activity also requires incredible hand/eye coordination, so multiple small muscles are being used to deliver a product. STEM challenges are just one of many creative teaching techniques that children love to be involved in and that bring a lot of joy to those who are implementing the lesson itself.
One of the most important educational activities is learning to read and write. Being able to do this gives you access to multiple career opportunities as well as harnessing creativity through outlets like writing poetry or being lost in a novel. This is one option that allows for a lot of creative teaching as there are many ways to deliver phonics instruction to children in cohesive and dynamic ways.
Learning the alphabet is the first stage of phonics instruction, learning how to decode these letters, how they should sound and be pronounced. Finally, the last stage of phonics is blending. How should these letters sound when they’re put together? How is that word meant to be said? There are a variety of exciting ways to deliver these lessons to children.
Creative teaching techniques can thrive when phonics-based lessons are offered as there are a variety of English language games that teachers, parents, and guardians can use to deliver to their children. One game that is particularly fun to play is ‘Knots and Crosses’. This is a timeless game where creative teaching solutions can be applied to deliver fun, creative games. One player is X and the other player is O and they use a grid to try and get three of the X’s and O’s (depending on which one you are) in a row.
How to turn this classic activity into phonics or literary lesson is by simply changing the idea of an X or an O into a word that you are trying to teach your child. As your child writes the letter down, they are using repetition to fully understand what the word is. When you are sure that they have fully grasped that word, you can take a similar word and try with it. This is a different and fun way of delivering phonics to your child. Creative teaching can reinvent traditional games and repurpose them for children to glean from.
Staying on the topic of phonics, the first lesson to be learned is, of course, the alphabet. The English alphabet can be tricky to learn, but there are plenty of creative teaching methods that make learning it exciting and stimulating for children.
One creative teaching solution is to take a plastic bag and some paint to deliver a lesson on any of the twenty-six letters. Not only is this lesson effective for creative teaching, but it also plays a large role in exploring a child’s fine motor skills as they manipulate the paint in the bag.
One of the first things you will need to do is make sure you find a sealable plastic bag as you don’t want to paint going everywhere. Once you have done that, carefully pour the paint inside and seal it correctly. Get a pen with a pointed end and get the children to write the letters onto the paint.
Children will be able to see the letter through the spreading paint. A top tip here is to get a white sheet underneath the bag so the letter is able to shine through on the plastic bag. This is a creative teaching method and activity for children to learn letter formation in a constructive and exciting way. Another great thing is that it’s totally reusable. You won’t need to start again or get an eraser to practice with another letter, all they’ll have to do is spread the paint again. A perfect creative teaching technique for letter formation.
If you enjoyed learning about this stunning homeschooling, why not check out more exciting facts about other homeschooling articles: Helping with Homeschool, How to Homeschool, 4 Inspiring Resources for Learning History, The Benefits of Homeschooling and The Online Guide to Teaching at Home.
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