Engaging Learners in Today's Classroom

Keeping students constantly engaged in a classroom can be very difficult, especially in a 1st grade classroom. However, my service learning teacher does a great job at keeping her students engaged and she does this using many different strategies throughout the day. Here are a few different strategies that I have noticed. One way she helps her students stay engaged is by quickly moving from one lesson/activity to the next. There is no "dead time". For example if a student finishes his/her work before the next assignment/activity they know they are to sit and read a book quietly. As I have been in the classroom I have seen how effective this is. The students in my service learning classroom love to read and look forward to every chance they get to read, so this motivates them to stay on task and get their assignments done. One day while I was in the classroom the students were told to get their writing assignment they had been working out of their desks. They had finished the writing part of the assignment and the next part was to glue the four different parts onto a different foldable paper, as the teacher and I passed out the foldable papers they were to color the pictures on their writing assignment. I thought this was a great idea because this gave them absolutely no "dead time" even while passing out papers.
Another strategy the teacher uses to help keep the students engaged during reading and writing is by having different stations with different activities/assignments that have to do with reading and writing. The students are split up into their groups or teams, they know which station to start at and where to rotate once the time is up for that station. One station the students are being tested by the teacher on their reading, the next station is on a computer, the next station is with a teach aid who comes in and helps the students read together as a group, the next is an independent writing station, and the last is another station with chrome books.
Just yesterday the students went on a field trip with the whole first grade where they went to a play at the Scera theater, field trips are a great way to help students stay engaged in a classroom. Some students are currently working on memorizing their parts for a play they are doing at school.

Finding an example of an instance where the lesson was not as engaging was really hard because the teacher does such a great job at getting her students attention while presenting instructions and often times she asks questions and has them repeat the directions, which is really helpful. But there was one time when the teacher gave directions for an assignment she simply had the students focus on her while she showed them the paper and read the directions on what they were to do. Maybe she could have had another student read the directions, maybe she could have asked the students to share some examples of what they could write, maybe she could have put it on the overhead for the class to see better, there are many different ways a teacher can give directions/instructions. In fact I saw her do some of these things later on.