6th in a Series on Engaging Children and Motivating Them to Learn
Marrena Ralph
You are using a reward system, and that’s great. Kids enjoy being rewarded for doing well, especially in review games, especially when there’s competition! Kids4Truth Clubs uses review games. If you’re wondering where to find questions, you can get them from a variety of sources:
- Write questions while you work on the lesson yourself.
- Have a worker write down questions during the main teaching time.
- Use questions from the memory work (the Kids4Truth Clubs Parallels Document makes this easy).
- Download EquipU review games and effective memory techniques.
Next, choose games that meet the different learning styles (e.g., visual, auditory, kinetic), rather than choosing games that appeal to only one of the styles. Capitalize on kids’ natural instincts. For example, younger children naturally want to outdo older children, and older children don’t want to be outdone by younger children. So use their instincts to your advantage. Play up asking which team will win the review game or which level will earn the most patches. Here are two hard-and-fast rules for games:
- After you choose a game, set it up or have its supplies ready before class. You will lose kids’ attention if you are distracted by the process of getting a game ready.
- Do not use the same game each week. Overuse of a game will make even the children’s favorite game become routine, boring, and ineffective.
Marrena Ralph is the clubs program specialist at Regular Baptist Press. She is available for consultation and workshops. Contact her at 866.754.4272 or Marrena@Kids4Truth.com. Marrena suggests allowing the children in the highest grade to write review questions during the main teaching lesson for you to use during review. Find out why when you read “Be Sensitive to Needs,” next in the Engaging Children and Motivating Them to Learn series.
