Hello educators! The weekend is close and I'm here to give you a great, easy and fun activity I enjoy doing with my students. The concept is simple, very cheap and you can use it in almost any subject you're teaching. From English to Maths and even History. Just pile up some questions, put only the answers on the board and let the fun begin!
Materials
- Board
- Board markers
- Swatters (yes, that's right, those plastic things we use to kill flies and mosquitos)
Skill development
We aim to develop quick knowledge access and reflexes, along with faster combinations of optical-kinetic responses.
If we choose to divide our children into teams, then we promote team spirit as well.
The main idea
We have a pool of questions (we can have them written in small pieces of paper and pull them out one by one - we or the students. Alternatively, we can just keep a list of questions and ask them out loud to the class). Then we write the different answers on the board and pretend that there is a bee that flies and sits over the right answer. We make a question and start buzzing like a bee until the students use their swatters to hit on the right answer. Each right answer gets one point. The student with the most points is the winner (we get to determine what this means and how we reward them).
An example
Let's say we want to test how easily our students tell verbs, adjectives and nouns apart. We write about 20 words on the board, all mixed up and then we go: "My little bumble-bee, what the right answer should be? Give me now a...VERB"
The students must quickly find a verb on the board and hit it with their swatter. The fastest right answer gets one point.
I practiced this activity in a class of 4, where each student had their own swatter. I also did it in a class of 17, so I divided the children into 2 groups. The groups formed 2 lines in front of the board. The first in line had the swatter, but they would give an answer without any help from the rest of the group. If anyone tried to cheat, their team would lose one point. After giving an answer they went back at the end of their line, so the second one would become first and so on, until we ran out of questions. (I must say the latter was more fun, because the students started yelling and saying: "Go on! Get it right!" I enjoyed watching them like that.)
Thank you for reading this post! I hope some of you will find this activity helpful. I know it's an easy and fun way to test my children's knowledge and let them move around the classroom for a while. Having them sitting at their desks sometimes is not so good. All this accumulated energy must be channeled somehow.
If any of you tries it with your class, I'd be happy to know how it worked out for you, so leave a comment anytime! Also, any feedback is welcome, as it helps me improve my work.
You are more than welcome to check my profile, @ruth-girl, you may find interesting educational stuff there like my series of posts on bizarre natural phenomena or various lesson plans.
For those of us engaging with education, @steemiteducation is here to join all steemian educators in their common cause of making our job easier, more effective and more fun! So, follow and support it. We all need each other to grow!
Thank you for your time and as I like to say,
Steem on and keep smiling, people! :)
