Enthusiastic and imaginative teaching can help instill a love of reading and writing.
Engaging children in English and Language Arts can be a daunting task, but with the right activities, you can make them very excited to want to learn. With a little imagination, you can engage your first-grade class and make them want to read, tell stories, and instill a passion for the English language.
Storytelling Adventures
Children love to act and tell stories. Break up the children into groups of three or four. Assign a topic to each of them. The topic can be a what-if spin-off of a story you read as a class or something of your choosing. Have the kids in the group come up with a short story to present in the class. Each kid takes a turn telling a part of the story. You can adjust this activity as you like, having one child come up with a story and telling it to the class. Be sure to pick exciting topics. Perhaps, you can have the kids vote for their favorite stories at the end and award a treat to everyone to feel excited about their accomplishments.
Hangman
Each student gets a turn to choose a simple word such as cat, dog, or fish. Pick subjects for them to choose such as food, animals or colors. The chosen student goes up to the board and students try to guess the letters that make up the word. Hangman is a game that many kids get excited about.
What Would You Do if You Had a Million Dollars?
This exercise is to get students' imaginations running wild. The children write down a list of things they would buy and also draw pictures. They then tell their classmates a story of what they would do if they had a million dollars. During their stories, you can write words of things they will buy so they can see the proper spellings. Have the students write one to three sentences using some of the words listed on the board. This teaches both writing skills and develops imagination.
True or False
Read or tell a story. Students have to guess which stories are true and which ones are false. First, start off with easy stories such as students going into space or discovering alien students, then work your way to more subtle stories and see if they can guess if they are real or not. This helps teach children reality from fiction and helps them identify concepts in a story.
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