Learning happens in other ways besides textbooks, should engage students and foster critical thinking. I asked students to predict what will happen in stories, morale, and symbolism to see if they could do more than repeat facts. I assigned writing prompts based on the stories to get students to learn to put sentences together to tell a story. I also used stories for word activities. I would have them find nouns or verbs and make columns to separate them. This helped visual learners. For younger kids I had hands on activities. For example, with Pete the cat videos I had them use tangible objects to find the correct number or color. I also had them pick various tangible shapes and look at examples of street signs and have them draw out those examples. I read a story about the environment and then had them draw different types of weather. This helped kinesthetic learners. For one student I had him draw groups then write down times tables then say them as facts foster his being a visual learner

think critically, more than book learning and be engaging. For younger students lots of hands on activities. Have students pull words out of stories and break them down into columns. I.E. verbs are broken down into past, present, future. Nouns are broken down into plural and singular. Last year my tkers had plenty of hands on activities. Pete the cat videos where they chose objects of correct number and color, cut out months of year and days of week and put them in order, drew out objects, wrote numbers and made the number of dots for each number. Have students do writing assignments based on stories read, ask story questions about lessons learned, predicting, symbolism, for older students do story element worksheets