Teaching Aids

Chalkboard or whiteboard: A chalkboard or whiteboard will help you demonstrate and instruct. The best recommendation, if you need to decide between the two would be the whiteboard—they are cleaner than chalkboards by far.

· Pointer: This wand-like teaching aid has many purposes. A pointer can help you with pointing out certain areas like cities, rivers etc. on large, classroom maps, on overhead projectors and on your whiteboard or chalkboard.

· Classroom maps: Using classroom maps for your teaching aids is a great thing to do. Often textbooks will have maps in them, but they will be smaller and harder to read. Sometimes when you have the children look at a map in a book and ask them to find a certain area—not all the children will be able to find it right away and so they will miss out on the lesson while searching. Very seldom will a student raise his or her hand to ask where on the map the class is looking, either out of shyness or embarrassment.

· Overhead projector: To have an overhead projector for the classroom is a wonderful teaching aid, you can even use overhead projectors as a substitute for large, hanging classroom maps. The maps can come in eight and a half by eleven or eight by ten sizes that can be projected into much, much larger maps onto your whiteboard or onto a white canvas in the front of the room. These maps can often be drawn on by an erasable marker (the same you would use for a whiteboard). Thus, there would be no need to use a pointer or to have all those huge roll-up maps to deal with.

· Computers: If it is within the budget of your school or learning institution, to have computers in the classroom or even just in a computer lab somewhere in the school as teaching aids is one of the best types of teaching aids you can offer your students. Technology is growing every day—and the more children learn about the basics of—and even excel in school-related educational software programs is almost a necessity these days.§ There is also computer software for studying at home. Teaching aids that can be used in the home as tutorials for students who need help in one or more subjects. There are lots of them out there, so you may want to research which ones will best help the children in your class who have fallen behind. If the software is too costly for the parents, perhaps the school could have this software installed for after-school tutoring.