All three of these techniques have at least one thing in common, which is keeping attention. Maintaining children s attention during a lesson is the key to the prevention of boredom. It is important to keep the children s attention in order to eliminate as much daydreaming as possible and therefore preventing the teacher from having to repeat material. Hands-on activities such as props or manipulatives, which are enlisting attention moves, enable the children to touch, play and visually see what they are learning. Manipulatives are commonly used in math because it is easier for the children to see relationships among numbers.
Involvement is similar to hands-on activities since they both entail interactment in the lesson.
Involvement, however, does not necessary require a physical object. It can simply be using a child s name in an English sentence written on the board. In the lesson that I taught, I got the children involved by telling them that we had to read the book together because it did not have any words. This activity kept their attention because every child had to participate in creating the words of the book. Getting the child interested in the lesson and in learning through participation is what involvement is all about.