Settler activities with kids

We all know that teaching differs greatly depending on the age of students. It sometimes can be very frustrating even for those qualified teachers who have been used to dealing with adults, to start to work with kids. The reason is that you should have enough energy, patience and wide imagination to make your classes with young learners engaging and not boring. This article provides some examples of activities that will help you to make your kids calm and settle them into a routine.

What are settlers?

Settlers are the opposite of stirrers. These activities motivate your young learners to sit down and be calm. Settlers help you to establish routine in your classroom. The significance of these activities is best seen in larger classes, as they help you not to lose much of your teaching time. Make sure that there is enough time during your lesson to give your kids opportunities both for stirring and settler activities. There should be times when they walk and are active in the classroom, and when they are quiet. In other words, stirring and settler activities should work hand in hand. Apart from that, you should come up with some signals to make your small students understand that it is time for sitting or for being quiet. As signals you can clap your hands, bring down your hand or use signal ‘Silent Coyote’.

Settler activities

1. Vocabulary activities — Give a set of words to your young learners, ask them to categorize these words putting them into appropriate columns (vegetables/fruit/drink, noun/verb/adjective, country/nationality/language)
2. Wordplay activities — These kind of activities will make your young learners use their brains. You can have some matching exercises with pictures and words, missing letters, crosswords or jumbled sentences.
3. Read/listen and draw activities — Ask your kids to read a short text or listen to it, and then draw a picture according to the text.
4. Cut and stick activities — These activities will make your students to focus on their tasks, use imagination and be quiet. After they complete their tasks, you can ask them to say the objects in the pictures in English.
5. Puzzle — Doing a puzzle is considered to be one of the perfect ways of calming small students. You can also set a timer and see who is the first to finish it.
6. Storytelling — It is not a secret that most children are fond of absorbing and interesting stories or fairy-tales. Hence, storytelling may really come in handy to make your kids quiet. Keep in your mind to use pictures or photocopies while telling the story to make your students more engaged in this activity.
7. Picture sequencing — This activity can be carried out either by numbering the pictures in a correct order to have a full story, or by cutting the components of a story and then sticking them in a logical order.
8. Spot the difference — Use two pictures that look like each other, but in fact are not identical. Ask your students to look at them thoroughly and find 5 or 7 differences. Here you can find some online games and here you can find some pictures.
9. 60 second challenge — Ask your students to sit down and write all the new words that they have learnt during a lesson. Whoever writes more words is the winner.

How do you settle your young learners down? Please share your ideas in the comments below.