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How to organize activities for students with shorter attention spans First of all, I notice that adults have more bigger focus on what teacher is saying and doing during the lesson, than the kids or teenagers. It is because, in my opinion, adults realize why they need to study English. For example, they will be able to find a better job or they may get an enhancement. So they know it is one of the important goals for them for the particular period of their live. And speaking about kids, they are too young first of all. They do not have a clue what is a goal and why they need it. They only thing they know is that their parents want them to study well, but it’s not enough in a lot of cases. And sometimes the kids don’t even speak their own language well yet, but they need to learn English. They are full of energy all the time when they are awake and they want to run around and play, and it’s a normal thing. And they don’t want to sit straight almost 2 hours (if you do 2 lessons in a row). They simply can’t allow it for themselves. Of course, there are some exceptions, but even these kids like to play. So we need to use their desire to play to teach them. It is useful for both sides – kids and teachers. If a student has shorter attention span, we need to come out with active games, playing which they do not need to sit right down and just listen. We need to encourage them to play with us. It is not hard to encourage kids to play some game, more harder to encourage adults than kids. In my opinion an activity for our purpose should include the following factors: 1. It should be interesting for all the students 2. The students shouldn’t sit on their chairs and just listen 3. It should encourage them to achieve something during the class 4. It is welcome to have some movement in the activity 5. We should consider student’s character when we ask him to play We can use for these students short activities, but including all the material we want to teach them. We can do 2 or 3 activities to cover all the material, divide our lesson into 2 or 3 parts, but make it more effective for all the students. For example, after they did an activity they are a little bit encouraged and interested in what is happening. Here we can this period of time to practice their listening skills or speaking skills asking them some questions or drilling some words and sentences. And also we can start here study phase and use board, worksheets and so on. It is a really good time to study after the activity if your students have short attention spans. Also these students may like something not usual, something that is extraordinary. They will be interested in it and they will want to know what is happening on. And of course, speaking about extraordinary thing, I don’t mean to show them new magic tricks every day. We just need to adapt and make more interesting our material and activities for the particular lesson.
