Make the Return to High School Engaging and Fun

The summer has come and gone, and now it is time for senior high school students to return to high school. Students are excited about their friends and school activities, and for most students, the first day of school is more about friends than academics.

On the first day of school, teachers usually take attendance, assign seats, hand out books and the curriculum, review the class rules and maybe hand out their first assignment. If your high school student is taking seven classes and hears the same thing in every single class, they will likely think that high school is pretty boring. Make sure that your senior high school students are engaged and have a fun time upon their return to high school by sending them to a school that actually engages them in their core subjects on the first day and gives them a taste of how exciting and interesting their classes will be.

Making day one count

The best schools make sure their students are engaged and kept on the edges of their seats on the first day back to school. For example, one high school language teacher gave students a sheet of paper and asked them to write down exactly 77 words about what they hoped to get out of the class that year, then the teacher anonymously read the responses out loud. The teacher kept the students’ responses until the final day of school then handed the responses back to the students so they could see if they accomplished everything they hoped to accomplish in their class. Then, on the first day of school, the teacher gave the students their reading assignments and handed out their books.

In another wonderful example of keeping students engaged on the first day, a science teacher gives all their students a project on the first day of class. When the students walk into class, they find Popsicle sticks, glue and markers on their tables and they have exactly 30 minutes, working in random teams, to design and build a contraption that has the imaginary power to improve people’s lives.

In a third example, a history teacher started an impromptu debate on whether Swiss cheese is better than cheddar on the first day of history class. The teacher first explained the rules of the debate, then they randomly chose teams.

Another teacher put their mathematics students into groups of three and gave them six minutes to come up with as many responses as possible to the question, “What is mathematics good for?”

Hopefully, you get the picture by now. We recommend choosing a school for your child that encourages this style of learning on the first day of school. There should be time after the hands-on activities to hand out books and talk about assignments for the next day, but the classes should be spent on teaching and learning in a fun and engaging way in order to get the students excited about returning to high school.

As the school year rolls on, there will inevitably be days when class is not very fun or entertaining or exciting. But there should be more days when class is fun and engaging than when it is boring. Learning and fun should not be mutually exclusive.

Here are a few other ways to engage students in the classroom:

• Create fun science experiments. We recommend incorporating hands-on activities to make learning fun and engaging. The best teachers try fun science experiments and before introducing any of the concepts, use a graphic organizer to have students predict what they think will happen during the experiment.
• Allow students to work together. The best schools also allow students to work together. There is a great deal of research that emphasizes cooperative learning strategies in the classroom. According to this research, when students work together, they retain the information quicker and longer, develop important critical thinking skills and build communication skills, just a few of the benefits cooperative learninghas on students.
• Go on a field trip. Field trips are a fun and engaging way for students to connect what they are learning in school with the outside world. They get a hands-on view of what they are learning in school, and they get to connect what they have learned in a classroom to what they are seeing at the exhibit.
• Incorporate technology into lessons. Technology is another excellent way to make learning fun and engaging. Studies show that using technology in the classroom can boost student learning and engagement.

Teachers who are comfortable thinking outside of the box have fun and establish a rapport with their students on the first day of school. And students are usually surprised to participate in an activity on their first day of school, but they usually enjoy this change of pace.