As teachers, we are excited about our lessons, but our excitement alone isn’t enough to keep students attention during lessons. Keeping their interest and focus is like following a recipe. We must add the right ingredients in order to get a good finished product. The four ingredients for a good lesson delivery are visuals, eye contact, interaction, and movement.
Use visuals.
Students need to have something they can look at whether one simple visual to focus on, or a series of visuals illustrating each point. For example, if you’re teaching a lesson about the life cycle of a butterfly you could have one picture illustrating the entire cycle; or pictures of each stage of the life cycle. If you’re teaching a Bible story, you could hold up one or two visuals or objects that help illustrate the story; or you could illustrate each scene of the story with flannelgraph, slides. etc.
Keep students’ attention by making eye contact.
A common phrase is that “The eyes are the windows to the soul.” Make an effort to make eye contact with each student you are teaching. This may require moving around, walking around the room. or sitting down to get on their level. If a student isn’t making eye contact, they probably aren’t paying attention. Of course, this isn’t always true. Some students are just shy. But establishing eye contact is a basic but super effective way to keep student’s attention! This is especially true when giving a Bible lesson to young children. If you are simply reading the story with your eyes on the page never looking up, chances are that the class isn’t going to be paying very close attention
Give them opportunities to interact.
Allow your class to practice active listening by giving them multiple chances to speak. A few ways to do this are to:
- Ask questions throughout the lesson.
- Give them time to ask you questions.
- Give them a word or phrase to say when they hear a specific word or phrase during your lesson.
- Leave off a word or two from your sentence and have them finish it as a class.
- (Example: You say, “A caterpillar turns into…”
- (They say, “A butterfly.”)
Keep students’ attention by incorporating movement.
Kids need to move, and they probably need a lot more movement than they get in a normal school day! Every teacher has different comfort levels with this. If I feel like a student is actively listening, I don’t worry to much if they are fidgety or standing instead of sitting at their desk as long as they aren’t being distracting to others.
Some good ways to incorporate movement are:
- Act out the story.
- Do motions to go along with different words or points in the lesson.
- Point to things.
- Take turns holding visuals and props that go with the lesson.
- Taking wiggle breaks. (Giving them a few seconds to get their wiggles out and then doing a short calming activity before starting the lesson.)
Conclusion
Using visuals, making eye contact, providing opportunities for interaction, and incorporating movement into each lesson goes a long way toward keeping students’ attention during lessons.
Having a good classroom management plan also helps increase student engagement. If you’re looking for some classroom management ideas check out this article.
If you’re looking for some short no prep Bible lessons with visuals check out the link below.
