No matter how well you know your stuff, sometimes the hardest part is just getting kids to pay attention long enough to learn something. A few helpful tips to maintaining your young students’ attention are:

1. Reach out

Instead of calling out to a child across the room, try going to them, positioning your body at their level and requesting in a firm but friendly voice to look at you before beginning your discussion.

2. Use attention grabbers

Use sensory motivational devices with varied colours, textures, shapes, movements, smells or sounds to help them focus. Warm, soft colours and an orderly environment can help with kids who may get over-stimulated.

3. Be playful

You can use a dramatic voice, sensational hat, clapping, a secret hand sign for them to duplicate or rolling a ball to each child to keep them alert.

4. Describe what you see

Refocus their attention by labelling activities or objects and talking or asking about the similarities and differences.

5. Be clear and specific

Keep directions short, direct and simple. Avoid saying ‘don’t’ statements, instead clearly say what they need to do.

With social media and job board websites that are relatively cheap to access, why do so many businesses still spend thousands of pounds on recruitment? For many jobs, it makes perfect sense for the business to recruit on their own, using many of the tolls available to them, such as LinkedIn advertising or posts onto job boards, not to mention the free avenue; word of mouth. There is now such thing as cheap recruitment, thankfully, and more businesses should take advantage of this. Of course, there are cases whereby specialist help is required. This could be a particular industry or niche where you’re looking for a very specific and talented individual, and unfortunately the job boards aren’t going to cut it, especially when we start considering ‘head hunting’.

What is head hunting?

It’s a technique that’s used when there is a very defined background from which the recruiting company is looking for. It’s ideal for when someone wants a person ‘who is from a competitor’ or where that particular expertise is employed in similar, but not competitive organisations. In the case of headhunting, many of the cheap recruitment options simply won’t cut the mustard.

So, putting these recruitment situations aside what are some of the top cheap recruitment options for small businesses? One kind of recruitment that seems to be growing in popularity, especially for small firms, is flat rate recruitment. This kind of recruitment is where you pay an individual or agency a flat rate and they then dish your advert out across social media and job boards. This is a wise option for those who simply want to get their advert out there for hundreds of people to see, and if it’s a job where you know you’ll have many qualified applicants who are interested, it’s a great way to spread the word and receive plenty of CVs to go through. Some of the flat rate agencies will even filter the CVs for you and order them fro most qualified to least, so you can have almost all of the work complete by paying just a few hundred pound. This was unthinkable just a few years ago.

Of course, with LinkedIn as a business orientated social media platform, you can use the advertising feature yourself, spending just a few hundred pounds to spread the word about the opportunity available in your workplace. This can be just as cheap as flat rate recruiting, however, and to ensure your ads are optimised you’ll need to learn a little about LinkedIn ads, so perhaps choosing a social media agency or flat rate recruiter to help is a wise option.

There are of course still the tried and tested traditional methods, such as advertising your job in the local paper and nowadays these are published in print and online, so the reach is still relatively good. Adverts in local papers are often viewed with more trust than a listing on a job board, and you can choose to have candidates email their CV and cover letter over, or call you to learn more.

As a teacher, it can be quite nerve-wracking to move to a new school. You have so many names to remember, and not just the students but teachers too. It does take some time to settle in, and you will probably feel like everyone is staring at you at times, but that’s exactly why confidence is needed, and it will prevail. If you are relatively new to teaching, it’s important you understand that the way things worked in your last school may not be the same this time around. Moving to a new school takes time to adapt, so be willing to change your approach, be open to making friends and learning who everyone, is, but most important keep your cool and after a few weeks, everything will start falling nicely into place. You can then begin to flourish in your new school and you’ll then be showing someone else the ropes.

As the new academic year approaches, are you ready for your next year teaching in a school? As the new year starts, being organised can help you get back into the flow of teaching much easier. The 6-week break is coming to an end so making sure you have all the essentials is, well, essential.

Making sure you have the basics such as an organiser, stationery, notepads and lesson plans is the place to start. After having a break from work, getting back into the swing of things can be difficult, from preparing each lesson, setting homework and of course the dreaded marking. Make sure you manage your time wisely to help you stay on top of your workload and provide yourself enough time to detach yourself away from school life.

Stress can often show in lessons and student pick up on this easily, if you feel like you are struggling with your workload, speak up early and it will become easier to manage with help and support from the rest of the team.

Good luck and happy teaching.

As the school year comes to an end, it is important to keep your students engaged with their work. Students can become easily distracted as the eagerly anticipate the summer holidays away from school.

Planning fun and interactive lessons during the end of term can work well for keeping students engaged and learning. Setting out creative projects to be completed within lesson time, such as model building can help keep them focused. Following this create a presentation session where they can present the teach the class about the project they created.

As the final days draw in, the lessons tend to get lighter and it can be a great way to end a school year on a positive note. This can include a film and popcorn session in between classes.

As teachers the end of year is great way to reflect upon the previous terms and start your preparations for the next school year, after your well-deserved break that is.

If you are a teacher, you may want to start writing your students end of year reports. The end of year summaries is a great way to show the students how they have developed over the year. It can also help point out any areas that require further improvements and those areas they are excelling in.  

These reports allow the students to understand exactly how they have improved, and they can then write new goals or targets to meet in the next school year. Writing school reports can be a time consuming task, as it will need to be complete during ‘out of hours’ in addition to the lesson planning and work marking. Split your time wisely, and start making a time management schedule to assist with meeting particular deadlines.

A great way to get personal feedback is by asking the students to write you an end of year teaching summary, asking them to write any ways lessons could be improved.

Children today spend less time than ever outdoors. They are so busy playing with their computer games, surfing the internet and texting that they simply do not spend any quality time outside. Children are missing out on the wonders of nature and the world around them. This is why the teaching student’s outdoors is a good idea for teachers.

Outdoor classrooms allow pupils to spend some quality time outdoors away from the classroom environment. Many people wrongly assume that outdoor classrooms are only of use when teaching about the environment or natural science subjects but, this could not be further from the truth. Outdoor teaching can be used to teach all manner of subjects. For example, children could take art classes in their outdoor classroom; this would allow them to draw landscapes and environments that they see. It can also be used in English classes as children can be asked to write about their environment and so on.

There are many Benefits of interactive teaching resources and they provide teachers with a compelling and simple approach to instructing anything to a class. PC programs and more can be all the more efficiently and effectively taught with the assistance of interactive teaching. It makes it simple for specific skills to be demonstrated before the entire class so teachers don’t spend as much time showing everything to every individual kid. This permits teachers to provide better lessons and has more opportunity to provide extra help to students who may require some extra direction and support.

Before, if one student had an extraordinary bit of work, all together for everyone else to see it, they’d have to all get on one PC. With this new technology, it’s easy to show the work on the screen so everyone can easily observe it. This reinforces things that students are learning since students can take what they realize, place it into practice, and after that demonstrate it to their peers.

As teaching resources, interactive teaching techniques open up many new opportunities inside the classroom. They open up correspondence, presentation, and even representation opportunities. By using the technology, information can now be presented to substantial groups of students in ways that are engaging and energizing, which leads to better outcomes for learners.

Many types of various materials can be used seamlessly together when using the new technology available with interactive technology. Teachers can bring together many materials and resources in all forms. Information and information can be presented in various organizations and after that saved for using again or for students who need to go over the material at the end of the day.
When interactive technology is used effectively as teaching resources, they can take many distinctive teaching techniques and bring them together. This supports an assortment of various learning styles, making it simpler for students who learn in various approaches to learning effectively.

If you look at schools which are very successful, where pupils work hard, make progress and do well, then it is likely that relationships with parents and carers are highly valued. Although there may be some parents who believe that their children’s education should be left solely for schools to deal with and that the teacher is entirely responsible for teaching reading, writing and maths, most parents understand that their child’s success and happiness at school will rely on good parental support at home as well as strong, consistent teaching at school.

If you are a newly qualified teacher in your early twenties, dealing with parents may seem quite daunting, especially when you may lack experience of having children of your own. However, you need to remember that you are the one who is the expert on education and who has a good understanding of how children learn. Do make sure you are approachable to all the parents of the children in your class. For some parents, their own schools days were not happy ones and some find talking to their child’s class teacher a difficult prospect. Remember as well, that you may have some parents who lack confidence in their own skills and may,for whatever reason, find English and maths difficult.

Good schools will communicate well and will support staff to have good relationships with parents and carers by allowing opportunities for parents to come in to school. There may be assemblies or performances for parents to attend where they can proudly watch their offspring on stage. Open days allow parents to come in and look at their child’s work at leisure. Some schools will also offer opportunities to explain about the Curriculum and explain how parents can help their children in constructive ways.

Being able to read is the most important part of having a successful education. Every single class you do at school requires reading to some extent, and while there are some practices in place to help dyslexic students get by, most of the time they’ve been proven to be inadequate. Therefore, one of the most important tasks for a teacher and for a school, is to be able to correctly gauge the reading abilities of students.

Determining reading ability isn’t such a clear cut process though, as to get a good understanding of their abilities you need to have a break down of them. The two main areas which determine reading ability is vocabulary and comprehension; or being able to an individual word, and then being able to understand how the meaning of these words is determined by the context in which they’re used. If there is a problem with either of these areas, you can then decide whether or not you need to focus on improving a students vocabulary, by helping with definitions of words, or if you need to focus on improving their understanding of grammar.