Want to ENGAGE ALL of your students at the very BEGINNING of class??
Here are some great ways to get student’s ATTENTION right away (on a BUDGET).
Brain Teasers ($0)
Good Morning!!
Brain teasers are great free ways to start off the day/period than getting students to think and work together to solve a problem?! 
https://www.braingle.com/brainteasers/All.html is a great resource for finding useful brain teasers!
YouTube ($0)
YouTube offers wonderful free videos to introduce any type of lesson!
(Ted Talks are also offered here, which is another great resource)
Here’s an example of how YouTube can be used to ENGAGE a student:
Say you’re getting ready to introduce a lab experiment and want to introduce lab safety to the class. No student is going to remember a whole packet of lab safety that they have to read on their own. YouTube offers great resources to do this in an engaging way.
Online Science Games ($0)
Students are getting online throughout the school day more and more often these days, especially with schools giving each student their own Chromebook.
https://www.ixl.com/ is a great free website to get students thinking in a fun way. This website offers games and simulations for a wide variety of science topics!
Online Animations ($0)
Here’s another free way to get the attention of students! Rather than verbally introducing a topic through lecture, SHOW them an animation that allows them to see what they are about to learn about.
Here’s an example of an animated water cycle:
https://pmm.nasa.gov/education/interactive/animated-water-cycle
DNA Gene Bracelet STEAM Activity (~ $20)
Okay, so here’s a more specific example that’s not free but still cheap.
All you need are: yarn ($5), scissors ($10), and plastic beads ($6).
- These prices are based on Amazon.
https://vimeo.com/225615134
This is such a great way to get students involved in the lesson, and to see how these genes work first hand! Keeping them ENGAGED is so important.
You don't need anything too fancy to keep students ENGAGED! With the internet at our fingertips, we have so many options available to us, as teachers, that we need to learn to take advantage of! I'm talking FREE resources people! @AnnMacKenzie #scienceteaching #EDT432
— Miss Welsh (@MissWelsh3) February 6, 2019
Katie, all of your ideas are awesome and would not break the bank of a teacher. I think that using youtube to teach lab safety is a great idea, considering you cannot really demonstrate risks of a lack of training. I think that showing a video at the beginning of a first lab in your classroom would be great timing. This allows students to get engaged on the topic of lab safety in real time! Then, they can demonstrate what they learned under your careful watch for all of the labs to come. Lab safety is a tough thing to get students interested in. It can look as though creativity within the lab is taken away. How would you get students to get excited about lab safety after showing a video such as the one you provided? What are some ways to keep creativity while also keep things safe? Great post girly!
Kate, thank you so much for the positive feedback! I like how you mentioned the timing of the lab safety video, because that’s exactly what I was thinking when I included it in my blog! I think that lab safety could be made interesting if it’s presented in a certain way. I might try to find a funny video that has to do with lab safety to keep students engaged in an otherwise boring topic. As for creativity, I think it could be effective if there were different stations throughout the room, each demonstrating a different lab safety rule.
Thanks again for the feedback!
Katie, I really enjoyed reading your blog. I loved the first saying that you used, it really caught my eye because of how clever the saying was. Another thing that I liked about this post was that you listed the cost of the engaging resource. I wish I would have incorporated the price into my blog as well. I also liked how you explained how these resources would help engage that class. The online science games are something I will investigate when I need a fun exciting way to engage my classes. Do you think different types of engages work better in different situations, and if so, why is that? Overall, this was a very interesting and informational blog post, great job!
Bailey, thank you so much for the positive feedback! I’m glad that my saying caught your eye! I think that including the price was so important because teachers don’t need to break the bank to have an engaging classroom! I would say that that different types of engages do work better in different situations. For example, if it seems like a crazy day, have the students do science games on their own Chromebooks rather than as a class, because the odds they’ll pay attention as a whole are slim.
Thanks again for the positive feedback!