[nobe-l] Keeping Students' Hands Busy During Presentations

[Tina Hansen]

As you may know, my team and I have been working on a project for this
year's BELL program to mark the anniversary of Apollo 11. The project is
really taking shape.

 

Our narrative is done, and we have just about everything we need for the
experiments.

 

However, the concern I have now was prompted by something that happened
during last year's BELL program. When we made our presentation, the
instructor showed a 45-minute video to the students documenting Eric
Weihenmayer's story. There was no good place to stop it, and the students
were not able to look at our display until it was over.

 

During the video, a sighted observer noticed that the students' hands were
engaged in unacceptable behavior. They were sitting for almost 45 minutes.
Also. Since they'd just had lunch, they had a lot of energy. After they were
able to get a look at our props, they had a hard time getting settled again.
This is why this year, we've built time in for them to look at props.

 

Since we're dealing with younger students this year, we want to try and keep
everything between 5 and 15 minutes.

 

So we want to find a way to keep their hands occupied while they're
listening to our pre-recorded narrative. If they're hyper from lunch, as
they likely will be, we need to help channel their energy so they can stay
focused.

 

To make things interesting, we're playing our narrative in segments. We'll
do an activity, then play some of our narrative, then do another activity.
But during the narrative segments, we want to keep their hands busy so they
won't engage in unacceptable behavior.

 

I know many educators deal with this whenever they play any pre-recorded
material. I can't be the only one concerned about this. Does anyone on the
list have any suggestions for something that will keep their hands busy
while their minds are focused on our narrative? Thanks.