KEEPING STUDENTS INTERESTED

When I taught students at Royal Education Centre (REC), I took notes of the reading passage in the government textbook and created clouds filled with the main facts in different colors and stuck them on the wall. Then students went around and led most of the activities by themselves after I gave instructions.

But, I know the students from this village are totally different. Thus, I was thinking about how to teach the lesson “The Wheel” from the Grade 10 textbook. I realized that I could use things they know in order to illustrate how rollers were used 5000 years ago. Even today, people from these rural regions are using rollers to move boats from the land to the river.

I elicited their background knowledge about wheels as they see bikes, cars, bicycles and carts every day. However, they cannot read the paragraphs by themselves yet. To help them understand the lesson better and quicker, I demonstrated by using tree branches, tree-trunks, bricks and pens. Indeed, seeing things they've read in a book  come to reality keeps the students interested in the lessons and encourages them to remember the information for longer.

This is important as the main problem for most of them is that they do not remember the previous lessons from government school. Students still do not know how to change sentences from active to passive, and there are a lot of sentences written in passive voice.

Our challenge is to improve our teaching skills in order to help students apply what they've learned in different ways. As my new students are not familiar with me and our teaching styles yet, I taught them very slowly but they were still interested and active in the class by the end of the lesson.


Aung Free
NEH Local Teacher Trainee