Effectively Engaging Learners

About Me
My name is Josh Hamilton.  I currently teach second graders at Ninth District Elementary in Covington, Kentucky.  My school is an extremely low-income school with around 275 students.  An overwhelming majority of those students are on free and reduced lunch.  I have taught Math only for the past four years because of departmentalization.  Next year I will be teaching all subjects, which I am extremely excited about.

3 Ways I Effectively Engage Learners

• I have taught Math only for the past four years.  The most effective way to effectively engage your students in math is to use  manipulatives.  Whatever math content I am teaching I always make sure that the students have the math manipulative that goes along with my lesson.  It is one thing to just teach students how to subtract with regrouping, however it is integral that the students actually witness and demonstrate how this works by using manipulatives such as base ten blocks.  I always have those manipulatives at the student's disposal whenever teaching or working on our math.  I also use a lot of virtual manipulatives on the smartboard to enhance learning.

• Another way that I actively engage my students in math is with Technology.  We are very fortunate to have many various forms of technology in our classrooms at Ninth District Elementary.  We have flip cams, webcams, smartboards (hands-down one the most effective teaching tools ever implemented into a classroom.), student response systems, etc.  The smartboart is in use daily in my classroom.  Most of my lesson presentation is done on the smartboard.  There are so many teaching resources out there for the smartboard.  It is one of the most integral parts of my instruction.  I also like to pull images from google and create my own interactive math lessons on the Smart Notebook Software.  I also try to make sure that the students use the smartboard as often as I do.  I like to have them teach content to their peers by modeling and doing interactive activities on the smartboard.  The Flip Cam is also a great thing to have in the classroom.  It allows me to video tape the students while they are working with math and instantly becomes a resource for the other children.  It plugs right into the USB and can be immediately viewed by the class.  Sometimes students can learn more from their peers than they can from their teachers.  The student response systems (clickers) allow me to immediately assess what is being taught and see what content areas or subject matter I need to re-teach.  

• Another effective way that I engage students is through music.  We use and create a lot of rap songs in the classroom for all content areas.  The students at my school are enamored with rap music and the hip-hop culture so it has been a wonderful way to present math content to them.  I also had my room decorated this year with everything hip-hop and the students absolutely loved it.  I also use a lot of whole class immediate response using whiteboards, when we are not using the clickers or smartboard.  It allows me to see immediately what I need to re-teach and at what level the kids are learning the new material.

   






Book Selected
The book that I have selected to read is 40 Active Learning Strategies for the Inclusive Classroom by Linda Schwartz Green and Diane Casale-Giannola.  I just received it in the mail today.  I am very happy I ordered this book because after just flipping through it, I found that it is filled with activities that can be put to use in my classroom.  Some of these are very familiar to all teachers such as the Think, Pair, Share method.  There are many new activities I have discovered in my text so far.  One is the Snowball fight where students generate questions and crumble their paper up and have a snowball fight.  They then pick the closest "Snowball" to them and answer that question.  I cannot wait to use this strategy next year.  I love texts like this because they offer strategies that you can use.  So many times, teacher reference books offer loads of  data and background information but not many resources you can use in the classroom.  I am extremely pleased with my text selection.