Teaching a brand-new class can be incredibly daunting. To start, every child learns differently, and being a teacher means finding ways to teach skills regardless of learning style, and it can take a while to build a connection. So, how do you win over your elementary school students fast?
Win your students over fast by being kind yet firm, setting and keeping a routine, and allowing them to have fun and express themselves. Different grades require content, discipline, and routines that are age appropriate. Make a concerted effort to show each student they are valuable.
In this article, I’ll provide some helpful tips for winning over your elementary school students. Let’s get started!
1. Be Kind Yet Firm
To maintain control and respect in the classroom, it’s important to be firm about rules and expectations. However, being firm doesn’t mean being discourteous, unlikable, or otherwise acting with a negative attitude. Quite the contrary, because a teacher can be kind and firm simultaneously. This technique works wonders because it invites respect and is coupled with compassion.
There are a few simple ways to adopt the kind but firm mentality:
What Does It Mean To Be Kind?
Being kind is subjective and can be based on a person’s cultural background, personality style, and overall life experiences. It can also mean different things to different individuals. However, being kind generally involves showing respect and consideration to others, and as a teacher, you can achieve this by listening actively and treating everyone fairly.
Let’s break those down even further:
Listening Actively
Listening actively is a skill that takes practice, just like any other. It can be easy to subconsciously tune someone out, especially if you’re stressed, tired, or anxious.
When this happens, we may physically hear someone talking to us, but we’re elsewhere in our minds, and the active part of listening is then switched off.
Actively listening to another person is hard – and even more challenging when the person is a young child. It means making a concerted effort to pay close attention to the student that’s talking, whether they’re answering a question, expressing an idea, or sharing a feeling.
Listening actively involves:
- Making eye contact. This means looking at the student directly (perhaps even getting down to their eye level, and facing them).
- Having receptive body language. This shows the child (even on a subconscious level) that you are open to what they’re saying.
- Giving audible cues and repeating their words. Providing feedback to the student by paraphrasing them and validating their feelings can help the child feel seen and heard.
Treating Everyone Fairly
Each child is unique and special in their own way. They learn differently from one another and sometimes live starkly contrasting lives. Treating everyone fairly is a critical aspect of being kind.
Treating everyone equally looks like giving everyone a chance to speak and dividing time as necessary between all the students in a class. It also entails having similar expectations and repercussions in place for each student.
This is incredibly difficult, especially for large classes and overworked teachers, but with firm boundaries, it is possible.
What Does It Mean To Be Firm?
Being firm involves maintaining boundaries and potentially determining and following through with consequences. It can feel counterintuitive to be kind because commonly, children don’t like consequences and may express their dislike or confrontation with them.
It can be easy to bond with students if you are seen as fun-loving and kind, but if you don’t establish firm boundaries from the beginning, behavior management issues will catch up with you sooner or later.
Rules and expectations are necessary because they signal to the student that a certain level of respect and routine is expected of them. It’s the unspoken contract for teachers to educate large groups of children at a time.
Some standard rules for the elementary school classroom are:
- Keep your hands to yourself. Body contact is prohibited in school. No student should physically touch another student, especially in an aggressive manner.
- Don’t blurt out or interrupt others. For the teacher to treat students fairly, the students must respect everyone’s turn to speak. Not blurting out or interrupting the speaker is obligatory.
- Treat others with respect. Similarly, students should treat each other with respect and kindness. Students should understand that bullying or disrespectful behavior will never be tolerated.
If students break the classroom rules or cross boundaries, being firm requires the teacher to follow through with consequences that are predetermined. The consequences can range from missing recess to revoking screen time. Consequences should vary in severity depending on what the student did and if it is a repeat offense.
Determining the Appropriate Consequences
It’s vital to think critically about what infraction deserves what consequence and also to ensure consequences are age appropriate.
For example, making kindergarten students write lines would not be an age-appropriate consequence. Instead, perhaps the student could miss two minutes of play time if they break a classroom rule.
In contrast, a sixth-grader might have to sit through a fifteen-minute detention or a phone call home, depending on the severity of the behavior. Either way, once you’ve determined the consequences for misbehavior, following through with those consequences is essential.
Following Through With Consequences
If a teacher threatens a consequence and doesn’t follow through with it, the student may learn that they can get away with poor behavior in the future.
There is also the element of justice to consider. A student being treated unkindly by another student would look to the teacher for appropriate and just action. If the teacher fails to address the incident, the victim on the receiving end will lose confidence in the teacher, and what’s worse, hostilities between students will intensify.
Keep in mind also that you need to pick and choose your battles wisely. Since teaching means dividing your time and attention between multiple children, subjects, and tasks at a time, picking and choosing when you give out consequences will make following through with them much more manageable. If you know you will have to scramble to gather resources during lunch recess for your afternoon lesson, giving out a lunch recess detention is probably a bad idea.
2. Set and Maintain Routines
Structure, consistency, and routines are crucial for school-aged children because it gives them a sense of stability and balance. When students don’t know what to expect, it can create anxiety, confusion, and behavioral issues.
Setting up and regularly maintaining a classroom routine will, therefore, help you win your elementary students over fast.
A standard classroom routine for a school-aged student might look something like this:
- Morning: Arrive at school, morning announcements, subject 1, recess and snack, subject 2
- Lunch: recess and lunch
- Afternoon: subject 3, subject 4, home-time
There are a number of variations in classroom routines. Often there are more subjects in a day or schoolwide activities. Regardless, each day consists of fresh air outside and nutritional breaks.
A classroom routine is often as detailed as specific subjects happening on particular days of the week. For example, a teacher might choose (with the collaboration of other teachers and educational staff) to schedule their class’ gym time every Wednesday afternoon or their library time every Friday morning.
In this case, a visual schedule for students to follow is often incredibly beneficial. Teachers can refer to the schedule whenever a student asks, “what time is recess?” or “what will we be learning after lunch?”
Encouraging your students to review the daily schedule can help cement it into their memory for the school year. I have seen schools post daily news for all the students to review in the morning with their classes and teachers.
Many educational staff members, especially after the Coronavirus pandemic, have also chosen to maintain online blogs to update the students’ parents; however, some may also provide students with an agenda to keep track of homework, events, field trips, and assignments. Having the student write in their agenda at the end of every day is a great habit to promote.
Sometimes, a teacher has to be away due to illness or personal circumstances. In that case, they can write supply notes for the substitute teacher to follow. This will help the substitute teacher keep the students on track for the day and provide the students with some form of consistency despite the change in instructors.
You’ve probably experienced, or at least heard, how wild things can get in a substitute teacher’s classroom. Sticking to routines and things that students are familiar with as much as possible will help minimize the chaos and disruption.
3. Plan Fun and Engaging Activities
Making learning fun for your students is a surefire way to win them over.
Although every student differs from their peers and tends to learn differently, a teacher can often gauge how enjoyable a lesson is. If you are unsure, ask your students for feedback.
Once you identify the style, methods, and activities your students like, incorporate them more into your teaching.
There are some specific ways of learning that my students adore, so I try to utilize them as much as possible. For example, scavenger hunt activities are a firm favorite. Hide questions around the playground or school where students must locate them before answering. The idea is simple and works with any subject, so why not give it a try?
Here are some other ways you can make lessons more fun and engaging for your students:
- Play more educational games.
- Incorporate more group work.
- Create more hands-on learning experiences.
- Have students help act out parts of a lesson.
- Incorporate technology more.
If the class has access to technological devices such as laptops or tablets, take advantage of the numerous fun educational games that can be found online. Here are some tried and tested websites that my students love using:
- Kahoot.com
- Blooket.com
- Gimkit.com
- Prodigygame.com
The sky’s the limit when making your lessons more fun and engaging. Students are more likely to retain information when it’s presented in a fun and unique way. In addition, they are more likely to be inspired and happy with you as a teacher if you actively endeavor to make lessons engaging for them.
4. Allow Students To Express Themselves and Connect
Finally, allowing students to express themselves and connect with each other are two of the easiest ways to win your students over fast.
All children want is to be accepted, heard, and understood, so allowing them to be their authentic selves without judgment will be immensely beneficial.
There are plenty of ways to allow students to be themselves:
- Accept each student as they are. This involves not judging your students by their preferences, home lives, or skills. It can also be helpful to encourage students not to judge each other, either. Plan lessons and activities to teach and promote tolerance in the classroom. That way, all students will feel welcome and comfortable in class.
- Make time for students who want to share things with you. Teachers are important authority figures in a child’s life, and if they want to share something with you, it will mean a lot to them if you make time to listen. If you are too busy at that specific moment, tell them that you will make time to listen to them at a later period – and keep your promise!
- Incorporate moments to share as a group. Incorporating special moments in your classroom routine can help build cohesion and strengthen relationships. Special moments could be anything, from celebratory assemblies to arranging pizza parties to reward the class for their efforts.
Of course, it’s natural to prioritize certain obligations if you’re swamped with tasks like planning and grading. Still, students bond with their teachers, and that bonding can include sharing personal stories and experiences. So, making space and time for that student’s voice is vital.
How To Make Space for Student Voice
I’ve worked in classrooms where students have the opportunity to share what they did over the weekend every Monday morning. Or, the teacher might center a particular academic activity around something personal to the student – this is especially prominent in art and writing classes.
These types of activities help students open up in groups and privately if they so choose. They’re often seen in classrooms where children are invited to share stories using a Talking Stick, share pictures of their families and participate in show-and-tell.
Younger students might be asked to share what they did over the holidays at carpet time. The older students may have to do an assignment on it instead. The tactics change depending on the student’s age, but being receptive to their feelings, needs and expressions will certainly gain respect and affection from students.
When students share, active listening is required on the teacher’s part to make the child feel heard, understood, and valued. Without that, students aren’t able to properly engage with the teacher or the act of expressing themselves. It may discourage them from sharing with peers or academic staff in the future or create a negative perception of the school experience.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, winning over your students involves being kind but firm, maintaining routines and expectations, planning engaging lessons, and allowing students to express themself freely without judgment. This shows students that there is a certain level of respect expected, and that same respect will be reciprocated by the teacher.
It also shows them that respect isn’t contingent on negative, authoritative experiences. In fact, the more respectful, the easier it is to be kind! With these tips in your mental toolbelt, winning over your elementary students fast should be a breeze!
Sources
- Personal work experience in the education field in elementary (10 years)
- Open Library: Building Elementary School Student-Teacher Relationships
- Skills You Need: Listening
- University of Denver: Talking Stick
