How to make your lessons more fun and interactive

Quizzes

A great way to make tuition lessons more fun and interactive is kahoot. If you are unaware of what kahoot is, it’s an online quiz program where you can write your own quiz. There are different question styles such as multiple choice and true or false questions and you can insert slides of information. You can also upload photos.

I think that this is a good platform due to the fact it is very engaging and fun for students. You can set a time limit for the student to answer the questions, which makes the whole thing fun and interactive. In terms of how I use it, I try to put a kahoot in the first 10/15 minutes of the session of the content that we covered in the previous session. This allows you and the student to see what information they have retained and it’s also an effective way of learning.

Interactive Presentations

As mentioned previously, kahoot is a good way to make your tuition lessons not only interactive but also fun. In addition to using kahoot, another platform which is good for achieving the same goal is mentimeter. Although this platform is more complicated than kahoot, it’s a great platform to use in tutoring sessions. It’s a presentation tool that is a great way of teaching students’ new information in an effective and engaging way. For example, you can carry out entertaining quizzes and present slides of information in a colourful way. You can also create word clouds. There are plenty more options so I’d really recommend that if you haven’t heard of/used mentimeter before to check it out.

I have talked about some platforms which are good for planning interactive tutoring lessons. Now I’m going to write about different techniques I use when teaching content to make it more fun. Learning new information by someone speaking to you straight for an hour is not very effective. Therefore, when teaching new content, I think it’s helpful to find entertaining memorisation techniques such as songs, rhymes and mnemonics.

For example, when naming the first 10 alkanes in chemistry instead of just trying to remember them a good trick is my extremely polite bunny puts his hat on neatly. This translates to methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane, hexane, heptane, octane and nonane. This makes content easier to learn in my personal opinion. If you are a creative person you could make these up. Or, if you aren’t you can search it up online – there is always a mnemonic out there! You can also make up stories and songs. Yet again these can be found online if you do not want to make them up yourself. Pictures and diagrams are helpful to make sessions more vibrant too.