The Dig is a newsletter for teachers and parents who want their kids to learn and have fun doing it. We dig into what makes kids learn, what makes it fun, and how we can make those the same thing.
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Hey {{first_name}} ,
First off, a little update for those of you who’ve been with me for a little while.
I’ve been working behind-the-scenes to make this newsletter something I actually want it to be and something I can sustain.
And that’s been very hard for me to admit to myself.
I want to be everything to everyone all at once and I ended up just shutting down and avoiding everything instead of showing up at all.
Going forward, my goal is to write a longer post/newsletter once a week and to send weekly shorter updates and newsletters.
I also changed the look and feel of this newsletter and there may be an update or two more as I learn my newsletter platform more. I actually just left a platform I’d been with for 6 years, and there has been a little of a learning curve.
So I appreciate your patience and hanging with me through this as I figure out how I can serve you, but also myself and my family at the same time.
Now on to the real content.
I was talking to my mom two days ago, who has been teaching 2nd grade since 2002, about having to attend professional development courses every year that aren’t related to what I teach.
And I’m not talking about health and safety PDs, I’m talking about subjects that I didn’t teach nor would I ever teach that they told me I had to take because they didn’t have anything for my subject or that I’d use and it was cheaper to do what the district was offering instead of paying for me to go to something actually relevant to teaching English Language Learners.
I, just like all other teachers forced to sit through something that isn’t relevant to them, hated these days. I sat there and was just like the least engaged of my students: playing on my phone, preparing my lesson plans for the first week, reading a book, or doodling instead of listening.
Because it wasn’t relevant to me, I wasn’t having fun or seeing how the information was useful for me, so I didn’t try or care.
And I’m not afraid to admit that.
But those experiences did teach me one thing:
If we want kids to care about what we’re teaching them, we have to make it relevant for them.
For some kids, this means showing them how it’s something they will use in the future or outside of school (this is especially true for math and science at the middle and high school level) and for others it means finding unique ways to make learning fun for the kids.
When I taught something new to my students, and still with my own kids that I’m homeschooling, my first thought is always, “How can I make this matter to the kids?”
With my kids at home, this often means going outside and doing doing our math in the dirt or with grass, venturing into the woods to make science more meaningful and show examples of how science works, or teaching reading and writing with nature-based themes.
When I was in the classroom, I found that I got the majority of my students engaged by relating the lesson to something from their personal history or culture.
For example, I was teaching math to 6th-8th grade ELLs one year and we were discussing integers. We were supposed to do an activity from their math book with elevation. I don’t remember the specific activity from the book, but I remember trying to figure out how to make this more relevant to my students.
I decided that instead of asking them to look at and talk about elevations of the places given to us, places they probably didn’t know, we would each look up the highest and lowest point in the country (or in my case state) where we were from.
This got them so excited! Because not only were they going to get to find out information about their homeland, they were going to get to share about it with the class.
Again, I can’t remember the exact activity, it may have been adding and subtracting or plotting points on a graph, but I remember how engaged my students where.
And at the end of the week, they did very well on our weekly quiz because they got excited and engaged in the learning.
For today, I want to leave you with this:
How can you make learning this week (or next) relevant to the kids you are working with?
Here are a few questions to ask them (or yourself) to help answer that question:
What do they frequently talk about?
What makes them excited?
What do you see them do during downtime?
What is the last thing they told you about in a conversation?
What do you see written/drawn on their books, notebooks, binders, pencils, etc.
Sometimes it takes a lot of clues and a lot of looking, but I promise it’s there if you’re willing to search for it. (Pro Tip: I used to keep a clipboard with notes about personal things for each kids I worked with so that I could remember [because middle school is a lot of kids] personal details about them and use that to make them feel seen, important, and figure out how to relate what we were learning to what was important to them.)
Wishing you a beautiful week,
Sammy
Hi! I’m Sammy Bohannon.
As a former teacher and the creator behind Unearthed Learning Roots, I believe we have to figure out what it is that kids love so that we can use it to really get through to them. I create resources to engage kids in the learning process without them even realizing it.
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