Active Learning: Ideas For Movement, Games & Hands-on Activities

This #2ndaryELA Twitter chat was all about active learning in the ELA classroom. Middle and High School English Language Arts teachers discussed movement in the classroom and layouts that accommodate it, games, hands-on activities, and technology that helps to engage students. The highlights are below.

Movement:
*Brain breaks using GoNoodle
*Stations/centers
*Using carousels to preview or respond to texts
*Four Corners
*Play SCOOT with task cards
*Use an "appointment sheet" where students set up appointments with 4 different students in the class, each meeting lasting 3-4 minutes

*Flexible seating

*1/4 class water fountain breaks

*Do a warm-up each day that incorporates some type of movement in pairs or groups
*Line students up facing each other to practice Poetry Out Loud recitations

*Small classroom? Take students in the hallway or outside

Games:
*For vocabulary, Pictionary and other made up games
*Kahoot!
*JeopardyLabs
*Spelling/Vocab Tic-tac-toe

*ZAP

*SCOOT
*SCATTER

*Vocabulary games from Vocab Gal

*Word chains

*Word webs (with a twist)

*Charades

*Literature related challenges, i.e. Dickens Dash to learn about Dickens before reading "A Christmas Carol." An amazing race style team challenge with clues, info, then tasks to introduce the author's life. At one stop, students learn that his dad had financial troubles and they have to balance a check book.
*"Survivor" vocabulary review. If a student gets a question right, they get to vote someone off the island, and that person sits down.
*Improv games

Technology:
*Backchannels like TodaysMeet
*Interactive lessons and assessment tools like Nearpod
*Ask and answer questions with Socratic
*Response cards like Plickers

*QR Codes

*Quizlet

*Quia

Hands-on Activities:
*Have students make mini books
*Interactive notebook foldables
*Coloring pages for word parts
*Flipbooks
*Props
*Interactive notebooks
*Sketchnoting
*Art
*Gestures activities

*Kagan games/activities

Hope you'll join us next Tuesday night, January 26th at 8pm EST to active independent reading in the classroom. The questions for our next chat will be posted here on Sunday. We'd also love for you to join our 2ndaryELA Facebook group (even if you aren't on Twitter). 2ndaryELA is a group of middle and high school English Language Arts teachers looking to share ideas and best practices. This group is an extension of our Twitter chat and a place for collaboration, questions, and encouragement. Feel free to post teaching ideas, success stories, resource links, photos, etc. that will enhance our instruction. If you missed this most recent chat, scroll down and read the whole thing below.

Page Turners: Using Games to Promote Learning {5/13}

Greetings and welcome to Page Turners, a weekly Wednesday linky, where I feature great blog posts I have read (and sometimes that I have written). Hopefully you will find ideas that inspire you in your classroom and your teaching and maybe even a new blog to follow. Read down to the end of the post for directions if you are interested in linking up a post of your own.

And now on to this week's topic: using games to promote learning. As teachers, we are always looking for ways to make learning fun for our students. Using games, whether it is to review terms or simulate a concept, is a great way to keep students engaged.

The Curly Classroom offers this twist on Bingo to review author's purpose. Using a PowerPoint of text excerpts and a Bingo board of verbs (both which can be downloaded for free from the post), students decide which verb best fits each text. On their bingo board they must add the title of each text to the verb and to use the verb to explain the author's purpose. I'll be using this on Thursday as part of a review for our upcoming state exams.

Next up, Michelle Luck of A Lesson Plan for Teachers shares her human board game. Think Alice in Through the Looking Glass. The tiles of your classroom floor become the game board. Add arrows to show the direction of movement and spaces like "roll again" and "move back two spaces" to mix it up. Have students roll a dice and if they answer the review question, they can advance. Monday is our last day of review. Maybe I can pull this together by then?!

Mind/Shift offers three games about viruses that teach interconnectedness: one board game, one app, and one that is both! How does this relate to your content? Science or health teachers this is a perfect connection to teaching about germs and health precautions. Math teachers you can definitely work some numbers into these games. Social studies teachers, are you covering the Bubonic Plague, AIDS, Ebola? ELA teachers are you reading Poe's Masque of the Red Death or Laurie Halse Anderson's Fever 1793?  The post offers ideas on assessing learning and connecting to real world events.

Mind/Shift offers three more educational games. Think Oregon Trail. The first, Elegy for a Dead World is a writing video game?! Students trek through worlds inspired by the Romantic poets Byron, Keats, and Shelley. They offer a free press copy to all you bloggers out there. They sent me one that I just haven't gotten around to trying yet. The second, Never Alone, introduces students to Native American culture, specifically the Inupiat people (native Alaskans). The third, Valiant Hearts, focuses on WWI. These games make me wonder what else is out there.

And the last post is a short one on using Pictionary and other games to review vocabulary. Seriously simple, but students love it. Could be used to review vocabulary or terms for any subject area at any level.

Be sure to check out the posts linked up below and come back next week for some great posts about end of the year projects & activities.

An InLinkz Link-up

Create Your Own Vocabulary Games

My school recently purchased Sadlier-Oxford's Vocabulary Workshop to use with each grade level. In the past, I created a root-based vocabulary curriculum to use with my students, but I had to switch over to the Sadlier-Oxford program since my school bought the books and wanted to get their money's worth of usage.

Each Sadlier-Oxford unit includes twenty words, which is way too many for students to master in one week (I used to do just five a week when teaching roots). While in the past I could use a game to review the day of the quiz, with twenty words I decided to devote at least one day every two weeks (I teach a unit of twenty words every two weeks) to allow students more practice with the words.

If the students aren't given opportunities to practice with the words then they will never own them. Just doing homework isn't enough; students need multiple exposures in a variety of contents. I do this through a variety of vocabulary games, all of which can be played individually or in groups. Here's a look at five of those games.

Game 1: Ask students to rate their reaction to situations. I ask them how happy they would be (1 = not happy at all to 5 = overjoyed) given a certain situation. Instead of ranking happiness, you could have students rank the amount of energy required for an action or activity, the cost, etc. This game allows students to see their vocabulary words used in different contexts. I try to make the contexts as relevant to students as possible.

Game 2: Ask students to identify the better example of the vocabulary word. This is a great way to practice the idea of shades of meaning. Like Game 1, this game also allows students to see their vocabulary words used in different contexts and I try to make the contexts as relevant to students as possible.

Game 3: Ask students to determine if the two given words are synonyms or antonyms. As the year goes on, you can incorporate words from past units as the synonym or antonym. 

Game 4: This is a "speed round." I give the students 3 minutes to try to unscramble all of their words; they must be spelled correctly to earn points. While it doesn't help students attach meaning to their words, it allows students to see which words they don't even recognize after a week of instruction and independent practice (their homework).






Game 5: My students' absolute favorite game is Pictionary. Every single student wants to draw and can hardly wait their turn. I love it because there is no preparation needed for this. Each artist gets a minute to draw and then teams get another minute to guess. I have them write down their answers instead of yelling them out to increase the number of students able to participate.  You have to trust that the artists won't just tell their teams the answers.

I love playing games on Mondays because it allows the students to talk and work together. It also means no paperwork or grading for me to start off the week. Finally, it allows me to identify the words which with students are still struggling and need more practice.

If you are also using Sadlier-Oxford Vocabulary Workshop, Level D with your students, you can find supplemental resources for those units here.