Y'all, I seriously do not know how we are already in the month of November! I feel like we were just starting school and now we are a few months in and time is FLYING by!
I just wanted to stop in for a few **quick** tips for engaging your students. We all know how impossible it seems to create engaging lessons for our kids. It seems expensive and {quite honestly} too hard to accomplish. BUT, there are several different things you can do to engage your students on the cheap!
First, I have to say that Dollar Tree should be your best friend!! Everything is seriously a dollar (sometimes less) and is so doable on a teacher budget. I frequent Dollar Tree probably WAY more than I should! This October I went to buy some things to really engage my kids during our last week before Halloween.
Some of the cheap things I bought were spider webs (they looked so real), streamers, candy corn, giant spiders, silly string, and supplies for a candy corn experiment. I came into school early one morning and with the help of my amazing student teacher we changed the room into a "spooky lab/classroom". This all cost me about $10. And it was so worth every penny!
We put up the spider webs all over the room and hung streamers from the ceiling. I played some spooky (kid friendly) Halloween music in the background via Spotify and we had a blast! The kids were so engaged as we did our candy corn experiments. I loved hearing them speak in terms I typically would not have heard! It was a great time to bring some science into our day and to get them thinking.
Now, this next idea is just ingenious. I have some seriously talented teacher friends who are kind enough to share their awesome ideas with me. This one came from one of my teaching BFF's Natalia. If you don't follow her on Instagram (@tictacteach123) or TpT you should go do that now! She came up with the idea to tell the kids to close their eyes and pretend they woke up stuck in a spider web. The kids had to write about what that would be like and think of questions to ask a spider. When the kids had their eyes closed and were envisioning themselves in a spider web she suddenly said wake up and sprayed them with silly string (which feels so much like being stuck in a spider web!). My kids went absolutely nuts over this. It created lots of interest for writing and was so easy for me to do! Here are some pictures from one of our days! :)
Y'all stay tuned.. I'm sure I will be back with some Dollar Tree goodness for November! Happy Teaching! <3
