Solid classroom routines and procedures are at the heart of every successful classroom. Transitions are quick, materials are organized, and all students know where to be and what to do. Still, one of the biggest obstacles each school year is getting those routines going with students. It doesn’t have to be that way! Keep reading to explore solutions.

Why are classroom routines and procedures important?

Establishing classroom routines lets students know what is expected, allowing them to complete daily tasks quickly and efficiently. Also, classroom routines create a comfortable and predictable learning environment for students. This can help build students’ confidence and reduce their anxiety.

Routines and procedures are important for all students in any grade level. Although it’s helpful to establish basic classroom rules, it’s also significant to create routines when teaching a unit and providing assignments.

Here are a few ways to incorporate fun and academic classroom routines into your daily teaching with Nearpod’s interactive activities.

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Easy classroom routines and procedures to engage students

1. Start off with an engaging bell ringer

When students walk into the classroom or begin a new unit, have a bell ringer ready for them to complete. The bell ringer should be a fun activity that’ll get students excited for what’s to come, such as a gamified learning activity. This way, you can focus on getting all your students where they need to be, and the rest of the class gets a little game-based reward for punctuality.

Place a Matching Pairs activity at the very beginning of your lesson to establish a classroom routine. It’ll be the first thing your students see when they join the lesson, giving them something to work on immediately. Nearpod has hundreds of free Matching Pairs lessons perfect for any classroom! Search by subjects, standards, and grade level to find an activity fit for your classroom.

Use a Matching Pairs bell ringer to review prior knowledge, preview new content, or just as a fun reward for transitioning quickly. You can customize the cards to match text with text, text with pictures, or pictures with pictures.

2. Check in on students’ social and emotional well-being

To cultivate a positive classroom community, it’s important to put students’ social and emotional health first. Collaborative classroom discussions should be at the forefront of learning. Embed moments into your instruction to check in on how students are feeling emotionally.

Collaborate Board is the perfect tool to use to jumpstart the discussion. This feature gives all students a voice to share how they’re feeling. Collaborate Board is a digital bulletin board where students can respond to a prompt or question using images, text, GIFs, or audio. All students can see the responses from the class and can ‘like’ their favorites. Teachers can decide whether they want to make the board anonymous or public by turning off or on student names.

Collaborating on @nearpod. Students share their favorite places in nature to practice #mindfulness! #sayvillestrides #sayvillestrong #SEL #mschat pic.twitter.com/JxVcIHw7P7

— Kimberly Pacia (@MsPaciaEDU) June 1, 2020

Host a Collaborate Board during any moment to ask students how they’re feeling, spread gratitude, or simply share their ideas. Turn off names to have anonymous responses, so students feel more comfortable being open.

3. Do a competitive review mid-lesson

Up the competition by adding a timer for an activity mid-lesson. Students can race against themselves to beat their best time, but they also love to challenge each other! A little friendly competition motivates them to practice and keeps them focused for the rest of the lesson. It’s a great way to help students review content mid-lesson, mid-unit, or even on their own before a big test.

Use a Draw It or Drag & Drop activity as a review. Add these activities to the middle of your Nearpod lesson and enable the timer for friendly competition! Up the stakes by giving the winner a small reward such as a night off homework. This is a classroom routine, and procedure students will appreciate!

Draw It is a teacher-favorite! Students can use this activity to demonstrate what they know by responding to a question or prompt by drawing and using text and images on top of whatever background the teacher uploads. The possibilities are endless when using this as a competitive review!

Drag & Drop activities have the power to add interest and excitement to everyday classroom learning. Use this activity to have students sort, order, sequence, or label using categories, charts, diagrams, and images. Customize your own activity or choose from our premade Drag & Drop lessons.

4. Get students excited with a gamified ticket

Exit Tickets and formative assessments provide valuable info on student learning, but too often, my sticky note supply runs low; and printing/cutting out paper slips can be a pain. With a digital formative assessment tool, little prep is required from you to check in students before they’re out the door.

Time to Climb is the perfect solution to reinvigorating this routine, and it takes just a few minutes to set up. To play the game, each student chooses a character to be their climber. They then race against the clock to answer each question as it pops up on the screen. The faster they pick a correct answer, the more points they get and the higher they climb. You can also pick different themes with cool settings, music, and characters.

The gamified environment is so engaging that your students won’t even realize they’re being assessed! Here’s a time-saving tip: Convert your Nearpod Quizzes to Time to Climb activities! No need to recreate anything you already made. Nearpod also has premade Time to Climb assessments for different subjects and grade levels for you to choose from.

5. Incorporate current events in your lessons

To help students become informed adults, they must have the opportunity to learn about community affairs and the steps they can take to become more civically engaged. Using current events in the classroom creates opportunities for students to be engaged and aware. Use The Week in Rap and follow it up with Nearpod’s Current Events lesson collection to dive deeper into discussions.

The Week in Rap is a weekly lesson video that’s released every Friday, covering the week’s news through rap! The Week in Rap is for grades 6 to 12, and the Week in Rap Junior is for grades 3 to 5.

Start implementing these classroom routines

With a collection of so many engaging, pertinent and innovative classroom routines to run, there’s no way both you and your students won’t love them! We’re so excited to see you put these routines into action. If you’re interested in accessing the activities and features shared, sign up for Nearpod for free!

The Nearpod Team

Nearpod’s award-winning platform is used by thousands of schools around the globe, transforming classroom engagement.

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