The Importance of an Interactive Classroom Environment

There's a great article on The Network today about making classroom time interactive for kids:
Click here to read "Talk to Me."

It's a great reminder of the need to involve kids in their learning. As the article points out, the bulk of Christian education is still hearing oriented and studies show that we only retain about 10 percent of what we hear. How scary is it to think that kids are only getting 10 percent of God's story? Adding visual aids brings this up to 50 percent, but in order to have children retain all of the information, they need to be an active rather than passive participant in the learning process. "Talk to Me" gives some great suggestions for working on this in your own classroom.

This article is actually a chapter from the book Dwelling: Helping Kids Find a Place in God's Story which is one of my favorite resources for volunteers. It was written as a companion for Faith Alive's Dwell curriculum, but I think the information is helpful no matter what curriculum you use. It includes 42 very short chapters, which can be read through quickly. So it's a great resource for volunteers, who may not have extra time to read a long book. I actually used it in our Sunday School teacher training last year--having all our teachers read two chapters for each training and then spending a few hours working through them together. Total they had less than 10 pages to read, but 10 pages full of quality information they could apply to their classroom time.