Your brain has two hemispheres. When you are playing the guitar, making art, or being creative in any way, you are using the right hemisphere. When you are studying, reading or analyzing, you are using the left hemisphere of your brain. Those who tend to be more creative, use the right side of their brain more often than those who are more logical and analytical. Everyone learns differently, but when you are able to use both sides of your brain, you can really maximize your learning experience and will be more likely to remember what you are learning. Through creative freedom and incorporating art, you can make regular learning more fun. Here are some common school assignments that tend to be boring, and some ways on how to make them a little more creative and also fun.
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Middle School Book Reports
Let’s be honest, most students dread having to do a book report. This is mostly because the teacher presented it in a way that is a lot of writing, reading without a lot of creativity added. Book reports can be fun again by changing them up a little bit. Some middle school book report ideas can be made more fun by simply adding some art to it. Ask students to create a comic strip or a comic book that would go with the book they read. They can take the main characters and create what they imagine would be the beginning of the next book. Ask them to add lots of color and encourage them to take time with their artistic progress. This will cause students to really try to understand the characters as they read.
Current Events
Current events are important, however they are often assigned in essay format. Try giving some creative freedom to your current events by adding it to a poster and encouraging the artistic challenge to make the news eye-catching, just how real news tries to be. They can try to make it look like their own newspaper front page. Another idea could be students acting out the news story by recording themselves and a fellow classmate by being a news anchor reporting on the events. Oftentimes changing up the presentation will help students become more interested in completing the assignment and also engaged in listening to others projects.
Research Projects
Your students will probably moan and complain whenever they hear the word “research paper” but these can be fun! Help students to brainstorm a topic that really interests them under the umbrella of the topic you are trying to teach. Once they have a great interest in a topic, a research project can very interesting by adding in some additional creation such as
- Creating a video- hone in on students great technology skills by having them use a video creator to compile different clips and adding them together.
- Present the research instead of writing a long paper. The students can research and take brief notes and create a presentation through powerpoint and present to the class details about their research. Make sure they add lots of slides and various visuals.
You can pretty much take any boring assignment and engage your students by simply adding a little bit of creative freedom to the assignment. When students are given the ability to create and use the right side of their brain along with the left side, true magic happens.
