Cheering students is a great way to reinforce classroom learning and encourage positive behaviors. Public praise can be an effective motivator and a great confidence booster for student-athletes.
Although cheerleading is not recognized as an NCAA sanctioned sport, colleges are often willing to recruit student-athletes at any stage of the recruiting process. To get on their radar, recruits should research schools and create a recruiting video. They should also participate in college clinics and cheerleading clubs.
Cheering for Students
Cheering students is a common way to motivate and recognize them for their hard work. The cheers can show up on their screens as they browse their dashboards or view activity starter pages, or when they complete a section of a list-based task.
Most American elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools have organized cheerleading squads. Some colleges also offer scholarships for cheerleading.
College cheerleaders may compete in national or international competitions, while most school-based teams focus on cheering for their football or other sports team. In addition to cheering, student cheerleaders often attend summer cheerleading camps to improve their skills and develop routines for competitions.
Students who want to join a school-based cheer team must go through tryouts, which can take a few days or a week. The process involves learning chants, cheers and stunts. They then perform these chants and cheers in front of judges to assess their technique, enthusiasm, rhythm, coordination and gymnastic moves.
Word cheering is a fun strategy that engages students by employing auditory, visual, kinesthetic, linguistic and interpersonal learning. This strategy allows students to learn high frequency and commonly misunderstood words by chanting them, adding cheerleader movements to support their chants.
Cheering for Teachers
Cheering students is a simple, effective strategy to reinforce positive behaviors. In fact, public praise can be a big confidence booster for students, even those who struggle to perform at their best.
For example, teachers can cheer students when they successfully complete their homework assignments by showing a sticker on their screen that they can click to see the completed task. This is a great way to acknowledge hard-working students and motivate them to finish their tasks on time.
Aside from encouraging students to complete their assignments, teachers can also use cheering to encourage learning by incorporating kinesthetic movement into the classroom. This can help build students’ social and emotional competencies while helping them to learn new language skills.
One strategy is to create word cheers and chants. Using high frequency words encountered in the Perspectives central texts, create cheers and chants by verbally dissecting the word into chunks (beginning, middle, ending).
Then, have students practice spelling each of these chunks by clapping for vowels, stomping for consonants and spell aloud to a familiar song. This is a fun, engaging and inclusive strategy that engages multiple learning modalities, including auditory, visual, kinesthetic and linguistic. It is also a great strategy for building vocabulary in English language learners.
Cheering for the Team
Cheerleading is a great way to build friendships outside of your school, as well as learn leadership skills. These include empathy, conflict resolution, respect for others and keeping your cool.
When cheering for a team, you want to be loud and enthusiastic. There are several ways to do this, including using an air horn or a super kazoo.
You can also get a group of friends together to help you create a chant for your team. These chants should be short and simple and easy to remember. They can be a fun team building exercise or a motivator during a tough time, like pre-game or a sluggish afternoon.
One of the best cheers to use is a short rhyme that will get your entire team going. You can make this cheer even more exciting by adding some clapping or motions as you repeat the words.
If you are rooting for a specific team or country, you can use an existing sing-song cheer as your base and then write out the lyrics in your own words to fit the theme of the game or event. You can also substitute a two-syllable team name for your cheer to add a little more flair.
You can find cheerleading squads in most schools or at youth football or basketball games. These cheering teams are usually sponsored by youth league sports organizations.