Choosing and designing fun activities for the classroom that everyone can do may feel a bit tricky. Some students won’t have the same motor skills as others. Others may be neurodivergent and might not enjoy or get the same benefits as other students. Planning activities that are ideal for all can seem daunting, but there are ways around this that can help every child in your classroom have fun and feel included. Creating an accessible activity that everyone can do requires some thought, some training, and even more compassion. To help you devise a new set of accessible, inclusive activities for your students, use these tips:
Improve Your Professional Training
A great place to start in making your whole classroom more accessible is to advance your qualifications. You could earn this Massachusetts Master’s Degree in Education, for example, and be prepared to work with children from PreK to Grade 8 who have moderate disabilities. The goal is to develop skills that will help disabled students to participate in integrated or in self-contained classrooms. There are similar programs and certificates that can even help improve your knowledge and skillset so that you can teach children who are neurodivergent as well. Having the right foundation when it comes to the various disabilities and conditions that children live with is the single best way to improve every classroom activity.
Focus on the Action, Not the Result
When you want to create fun activities, the fun needs to be in the doing, not in the result. If the result doesn’t matter, everyone can have fun at their own pace. This is particularly useful when the activities you choose cannot possibly have a clear winner. While a race always has a winner, an art project does not. It is entirely subjective, and there will be something great for everyone.
Give Multiple Ways to Engage with the Activity
Offering activities that have different ways to approach them isn’t just great for making your classroom more inclusive and accessible. It is also a great way to encourage out-of-the-box thinking and individuality. If you have a challenge and offer students the ability to tackle the problem any way they see fit, then you will see a lot of individual problem solving that works with their specific needs and requirements.
The best part is that this can actually help your students understand more about each other as a whole. You can really show them that just because someone approaches life or a problem differently, that does not diminish the results or their successes.
Offer Multiple Activities
No one is perfect at everything. By giving students a few different activities (for example, three) that each focusses on a different skill or way of learning, you can actually give them a great chance to succeed by working with their strengths. We all work with our strengths professionally – now it is time to give kids that chance as well.
As a bonus, you can also have them tackle the activity they find most challenging, just so that they have the chance to learn about their weaknesses and how they can work around those weaknesses as well.