5 Easy Ways to Remember Your Students’ Names

Every teacher wants to create the appropriate dynamic in the classroom – one way of helping to achieve this is by ensuring you know your students’ names.  Not only does this give the students a morale boost when they hear you calling them by their names, but they'll respect you for making the effort to get to know them.  It also makes it easier for you to write student reports and monitor each student's progress.  Here are five easy ways to help remember who is who in your classroom:

1  Get your students to create a name card for their desks – fold an A4 piece of paper in half, then fold both halves again towards the central crease in the paper – you’ll end up with a Toblerone-shaped piece of paper which the students can write their names on;

2  Draw a map of the layout of the students’ desks and write their names in their respective spots;

3  Get students to interview each other in pairs, using the grammar from the lesson’s aim if possible, and then the student reports back to the class ensuring that they use their partner’s name;

4  For a warm-up use a memory game where students sit in a circle and one-by-one they tell the class what they did last night/weekend or possibly describe their hobbies, fears, dreams etc., adding to what previous students have said.  For example, student A says, ‘I went to the cinema last night’ student B says, ‘Yoshi went to the cinema last night, and I went to the gym’.  Student C then says, ‘Yoshi went to the cinema last night, Akiko went to the gym, and I went out for pizza’ and so on.  Some teachers get the students to tell everyone something interesting about themselves, so that the teacher can then remember the students’ names through association – mnemonics;

5  Send the register around the class in a specific direction so that you can work out who signed where – you could then use the classroom layout to map where each student is sitting.

They sound simple, but the effort you make to remember your students’ names will be greatly appreciated – remember how you felt when your teacher addressed you personally?