Surefire Ways to Keep Your Students Engaged When They Are Tired
Coping with tired children is one of the most pervasive problems for school teachers. Rigorous schedules in and out of school, long days, and early hours all combine to make fatigue one of your biggest opponents in the classroom. It’s a problem that every single teacher faces, and often on a very big scale. So what can you do about it? How can you do your job when your students are less-than-optimally prepared for learning?
Ideally, you could control the factors that impede the sleep and rest functions of your classroom’s students; but we all know we do not live in an ideal world, and that will never happen. All that you are left with, then, is the ability to manage the situation the best you can. Here is a list of tips and tricks to help you make your best attempt at doing just that.
Helpful Ways to Keep Tired Kids Engaged
Set the Stage. The best thing that you can do is to set the stage within the classroom for optimal learning and discipline (as we all know, fatigue leads directly to discipline problems). Keep the environment and temperature moderate as best you can – not so cold that students are distracted and further fatigued by keeping warm, but not so warm that you’re all falling asleep. Allow for reasonable comfort-measures for the kids (like allowing them to add sweaters or peel layers, keep bottles of water, etc.).Keep the room bright without being distractingly so, and moderately stimulating.
Attend to detail. Once you get to know your students, pay attention to further distractions and possibly poor-mixing neighbors. Always work to make the classroom environment stimulating, while setting the tone for learning and mutual respect.
Be an example. This probably sounds trite, but we cannot expect that of our students which we are not willing to be ourselves. Work to keep yourself interested, and share your interests with your students, working to find stimulating and interesting topics and activities. If you’re bored and yawning, you can be sure they will be.
Make It Relevant. The more relevant topics and experiences are to your students, the more interested and engaged they will be. Find ways to adjust your curriculum to your class, rather than the other way around. Relate and enjoy as a group.
Balance the Act. It can be easy to overdo stimulating experiences, and develop chaos in the classroom rather than interest and participation. Always gauge the atmosphere and know when you may need to reign-in that collective enthusiasm.
Managing the Off-Hours. You don’t have a lot of control over your students once the day ends, but you do have some. Do what you can to help your students get the rest they need, and develop habits that will help them minimize fatigue. Teach about proper nutrition and rest and sleep habits; get to know what challenges they face and what may be keeping them from getting proper rest and nutrition; moderate homework and keep it reasonable, and work with other teachers to make sure that you may not be inadvertently overloading them as a collective group.
Of course, these tips only skim the surface of the challenges that you and your students face. Do feel free to comment and add more suggestions to the list, but we do hope this will at least get you a start on the path to management in the face of one of the most widespread educational foes.
M. Ellen Ward covers topics focusing on how to choose a school for a masters in elementary education degree.