LET'S BE CREATIVE! :)

In the classroom, many teachers believe that the only way students will learn is if the students are given some sort of incentive, but why can’t we teach our students to love learning for the sake of learning? I believe that we can. Many students, especially elementary students, are at school because that is what their parents tell them to do. They may not want to learn, or be in the classroom; but we as teachers need to make them enjoy the work they are doing. Pink suggests that people like to do work that doesn’t seem like work. I believe that is what we need to make our classroom seem like. We need to make learning fun, exciting, and engaging. Papers aren’t fun, worksheets aren’t fun, and tests aren’t fun. Than why are our schools based upon those three things? It is because we have always used those and we do not think of fun and creative to teach and evaluate student work.

Some suggestions we have for evaluating student learning in creative ways:

• Have students evaluate their own work.
• Class discussions.
• Have a worksheet cabinate where students can pick extra worksheets to do.
• Educational computer games/programs
• Let them plan a field trip or service project that corresponds to something they are learning about.
• Exit Slips
• A question or 2 about what they learned today. It's short and informal, they may not even realize that you are evaluating their knowledge.
• Create a game to play
• The fly swatter game: This game is where you split the class into 2 teams. On the board you have vocab terms. Each team gets a new representative each round. You ask the students the question and they need to find the word and hit it with their fly swatter.
• Have project sheets where there is more than one project option for students to choose from:
• Science Fair Project:
• This doesn’t not need to be in just a science class! Have the students make an argument or hypothesis and have them research that argument and present it to the class. ex. If a student is really into WWII, they could make the statement that: The use of U-boats by the Germans is an important contribution to modern war. Than they could do research and present the information they found.

• Videos:
• Window's Movie Maker
• Imovie
• Have students create movies to show their knowledge
• Here is an example I made to teach students about English, Science, Religion, and Music. 
•  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_OTZ80ubTA

•  Make a board game
• Give a speech
• Complete with costume and music 

• Make a newsletter
• Mind maps (flow charts):
• Start with a central idea, have arrows pointing to key concepts, from the key concepts, have more arrows pointing to other aspects of the central idea.
• Here is an example:

• Make a blog
• Whoo!  That's what we are doing!
• Make a magazine
• This was one of my favorite projects in High School. It was a partner project and we had to create a magazine that talked about multiple books we had read during the semester. This included articles, crossword puzzles, quizzes, ect.

• Create a Wiki
• Make an art project
• This was for math to show how shapes work together

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• Music: 
• Have the students make a song to demonstrate their knowledge

• Have a create your own sections
• Let the students chose their own project so they will be more excited about completing the project