How to Get Students Excited to Learn in the Classroom

One of the best things you can do to get students to participate — and motivate elementary students who are still developing — is to foster a sense of community by creating a welcoming learning environment. Educators may be able to achieve this by being respectful of each student, approachable and responsive to their individual needs. When students feel safe in the classroom, they may become more focused in class and eager to learn. 

You may also create a stronger sense of community by encouraging students to join extracurricular activities and take part in team-building activities and collaborative projects. This may help students find things in common with classmates and become closer to one another. 

2. Decorate the Classroom With Engaging Learning Materials 

Make your classroom colorful and engaging. With appealing and easy-to-understand visual aids, you can show students that learning is fun. For instance, you might decorate the classroom with colorful diagrams and charts, past student projects, models and educational posters. You may even give them a seasonal touch, allowing students to look forward to the different seasons and their complementary educational posters around the classroom. Success by Design offers a Character Bulletin Kit to decorate while emphasizing character development in the classroom!

3. Use Flexible Seating Arrangements 

Flexible seating involves providing various seating arrangements around the classroom to increase comfort and engagement. For example, in addition to the usual tables or desks and chairs, you can incorporate a sofa, stools, beanbag chairs, yoga balls, crate seats or a low table and floor pillows. 

These creative seating options offer a great way to help children stay focused in the classroom during reading and writing time. This is because some students with short attention spans or ADHD may become easily distracted when they sit at their desk for most of their lesson time. With flexible seating options, these students may be able to remain comfortable and focused on the task at hand. 

4. Get to Know Each Student 

To foster an enthusiastic environment, you need to show your students you care about them and their academic growth. One way to do this is by asking your students to introduce themselves and share a bit about themselves on the first day of school. After this, remember their names and interests, and bring them up during conversations and lesson examples. Doing so shows your students that you listened and remembered. 

This may improve their confidence in speaking and asking questions during lessons, as they know their teacher cares and that they are part of a welcoming environment where they'll be heard. Additionally, you may welcome and greet each student daily when they enter the classroom, build relationships with their families and attend activities they are involved in. 

5. Be Passionate and Enthusiastic 

When educators share their excitement and passion about a topic, it inspires students to feel the same way. You can showcase why by relating the learning material to real-life situations and sharing your personal story. You may also give lessons with more enthusiasm and promote learning techniques that are fun and easy to remember. For example, you could teach certain rhymes, acronyms or similarities that will remind them of the answer or how to solve an issue. 

A passionate educator is also thoughtful and encouraging when a student finds a lesson challenging to understand. In these cases, you can explain to them that it's OK to make mistakes — that you've done it too before you got it right. This is an excellent way to help them keep their passion and determination. 

6. Encourage Engagement and Communication 

To cater to the learners who understand topics best through discussing them with others or tackling things hands-on, it may help to schedule times for small groups, large groups and one-on-one discussions. This technique for building an enthusiastic learning environment offers an excellent way for students to engage with one another and socialize. It helps create a cheerful and collaborative space.

You might arrange these sessions for various reasons, such as to discuss learning materials, provide a temporary brain break, get to know students personally or help them improve their learning abilities. You may also incorporate classroom discussions where all students take part in explaining something they learned that day or something exciting they look forward to on the weekend. This may be a great way to end a busy school day on a relaxing note. 

7. Celebrate Successes 

Incorporate positive reinforcement when students make new achievements so they can feel valued and recognized for their efforts. When students answer a question correctly or solve a problem, show enthusiasm and congratulate them. Celebrating each student's achievement may help motivate them. It can boost their self-esteem, make them feel determined to continue working hard and motivate other students to try their best so they may be celebrated, too. 

How to Create Exciting and Engaging Lessons 

To teach children to focus in the classroom, you need to give them a reason to listen and care, which is why excitement is so important. Let's explore 10 key techniques you can implement to get children excited about learning. 

1. Get Students Involved 

Encourage students to participate by teaching them responsibility and involvement. You may engage students with lessons when you assign everyone a task to do. Delegate certain students to decorate or tidy the classroom and others to erase the board, hand out materials and read sections out loud. You can also rotate these roles regularly so everyone has an opportunity to handle different responsibilities.

This may allow students to take pride in their tasks and contributions to the class and give them a sense of accomplishment. Encourage students to work together to assign different tasks to the appropriate person. 

2. Use Real-World Examples 

To get students excited about a lesson, they need to understand the concept and how it relates to practical experiences. For example, you may show your elementary students how certain equations help ensure they have enough money to buy items from a store or what time their parents might get back from work. 

This enables your students to see the value and purpose of what they're learning and encourages them to listen attentively to master the subject matter. In these instances, do some research before your lesson on surprising situations they might need the information for outside of school. This is also a great way to grab students' attention before you begin teaching them. 

3. Connect Learning to Their Personal Interests 

Another way to get students excited about learning is to understand their interests. Take time to get to know your students and what they love most, whether it's a certain type of food, science, technology, art or historical era.

Find ways to relate their interests to the topics you teach to gain their attention and interest. For example, you might relate learning concepts to popular children's shows. Research shows that personalized learning yields more positive learning outcomes, such as higher retention rates and better assessment performance.

4. Use Hands-On Practices 

Some learners understand concepts best when they're tackling them head-on and can touch and experience them firsthand. These work well for practical learning topics that allow for performance plays, science experiments and art projects. When you make learning feel more like playing, children get to have fun and be excited. It becomes a memorable enough experience that they remember the concept when test time comes around. 

It may help to inform students about these exciting events days or weeks in advance to build up their excitement. Doing so can encourage them to practice and stay engaged in lessons that are needed before they can perform the activity themselves. 

5. Allow Students to Have a Say 

When students are involved in their learning experience, they can feel more excited to learn and engaged in lessons. Get parents involved in this, too, since they may understand how their children learn best. 

Create a choice board with different ways they may learn about a topic and demonstrate their knowledge. This technique gives learners the opportunity to operate in their areas of strength and demonstrate their capabilities. Make sure you adapt these choice boards to different grade levels and subjects where possible. 

6. Use Technology and Multimedia 

In the modern world, more children are drawn to using screens in their free time, whether they're watching TV, playing digital games or watching videos on YouTube. With that in mind, merging technology with education in the classroom may help excite and engage children.

One way to do this is by incorporating apps that make educational online quizzes and interactive online activities feel like games to children. You might also play educational YouTube videos for students as a portion of the lesson. These may become useful when teaching a complex concept, so be sure to search for helpful videos that explain or showcase concepts well through visual representations. 

Additionally, you may be able to use music for younger students when introducing them to a new learning concept. For example, they can listen and sing along to songs about learning vocabulary concepts. If they sing it enough times, they may be able to memorize the words and retain the important information. 

7. Incorporate Classroom Games 

Another great way to encourage student motivation and engagement in the classroom is by turning lesson activities into games. For instance, you can divide learners into groups and have them play a customized trivial pursuit on topics they've learned in class so far. This may allow students to sharpen their knowledge of learning concepts and encourage them to stay engaged and alert in class. 

Otherwise, you might arrange games on paper that students can enjoy at their own pace. It may help to research a few popular online classroom games that your students can enjoy digitally. Some of these apps allow for customization, such as importing your classroom content and tweaking certain areas to their education level. 

8. Offer Incentives and Classroom Rewards 

To enhance the experience of celebrating students' achievements, offer rewards for their accomplishments. This can come in many forms, depending on what your students value most. For example, you might offer a student a piece of chocolate or a toy for winning a class activity competition. When splitting students into groups, you may also offer the winning group an extra 10 minutes to their break. 

Periodically, it's also important to reward your whole class when they worked really hard or all passed a test. In these situations, you could offer each student a sweet treat, order pizzas for the whole class or arrange a small class party to celebrate their win. 

9. Integrate Inquiry-Based Learning 

With inquiry- and project-based learning, students follow a series of steps to resolve an issue. This method helps teachers show students that they are relying on them to do something, motivating them to do their best. 

Try finding something within your school or community that needs improvement. This could include cleaning up an outdoor area or hosting a bake sale for the school. In these situations, students are prompted to:

• Look at the core issue.
• Brainstorm ways to solve it.
• Research possible ways to contribute to the solution.
• Create and execute the plan. 

Allowing students to actively do something about the issue will help them take pride in their actions. Additionally, it helps them stay excited about what they learn in these processes. 

10. Make Lessons Fun and Interesting 

How you teach students factors into building their excitement, too. Start your lessons with an engaging or intriguing hook. This might include a thought-provoking question, a shocking fact, a fascinating story or an unexpected and intriguing visual. You can use multimedia and technology resources to provide them with a sensory-rich experience that catches their attention. 

You can then launch into a story that directly relates to your learning topic. Some children are more likely to stay engaged and retain information when you tell them an interesting story. If possible, you may also try to incorporate humor. In addition to keeping their attention, humor helps build a positive learning environment and stronger rapport when they feel comfortable in your classroom. 

Motivation Strategies for Students 

While modifying the environment and your teaching techniques may help enhance student excitement in the classroom, it's equally important to teach your students valuable practices so they can motivate themselves and take ownership of their efforts and achievements. Here are four helpful motivation strategies your students can implement. 

1. Set Clear, Achievable Goals 

Encourage your students to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals. These goals may be more helpful than ordinary goals because they outline when and how students will achieve a goal in addition to the overall objective. They may also be more effective in the classroom because they break down learning into more manageable chunks, allowing you to identify progress more easily. 

Take some time out of a lesson to help your students form goals they can achieve within a month. This is a great way for students to motivate themselves and others to stay engaged in class so they may reach their goals. 

2. Implement a Growth Mindset 

Teach your learners about the power of the growth mindset. A growth mindset is the determination that there is always room for improvement. It encourages students to put in constant effort and view setbacks as an opportunity to grow. In turn, this mindset helps foster a positive environment in which students become invested in their learning process. 

3. Use Checklists and Rubrics 

Your students may be more excited about learning when they know what to expect. Provide your learners with rubrics and checklists that outline a subject's key learning topics for the term and what is expected of the students during that time. Students may gain confidence in having a clear understanding of what's to come. The checklists also help them see the progress they make as they move through the term. Students can tick off concepts they've learned and understood. 

4. Incorporate Student Planners 

Planners offer an excellent way to help students maintain motivation and actively work toward their SMART goals. As such, they can track their progress and ultimately cultivate a growth mindset. Whether it's an assignment notebook or a daily student planner, these tools help students plan out their study time and daily tasks that will help them reach their goals one step at a time. 

Get Students Motivated With Student Planners From Success by Design 

To start this new journey for yourself and your students, student planners may help them stay consistent and motivated to succeed in their educational endeavors. Success by Design provides various high-quality student planners with character-building content to help students plan, organize and execute their tasks and after-school activities. 

These planners are available to elementary, middle school and high school students to keep track of tasks and build healthy academic habits, pushing them in the right direction to develop excitement and a passion for learning.

Whether you require STEM student planners, daily student planners, assignment notebooks or character-building planners, browse our elementary student planners today. You can also contact our friendly team to help you find a suitable planner.