There are raucous learning games that your students will remember and want to play again.
There are raucous learning games that your students will remember and want to play again.
Greg Collins, Substitute Teachers Lounge, you know, you could show up and think you've got some fun ways to play in learn in the classroom and you send to up to the board, you had them compete on a problem. The winner is the winner. Maybe you do it by teams. Yeah, that's okay. But maybe we want to make our games a little bit more raucous. Let's talk about that today Alright, folks, as I record this today, I am setting in a hotel resort. I apologize if my Embassy Suites folks don't think that is a sufficient description. It's a very nice hotel in Nashville. We are here my my brother here for the SEC basketball tournament. I told you last week I love this time of year. I am fortunately, recording this after my chosen team has already lost early he's on cheering for my brothers. Now. He's a Texas a&m guy. And you know, if you want to cheer for your teams, it's left in the SEC. It's out at this point, but don't be here. There's gonna be something different. Alabama, Missouri, Texas a&m, and Vanderbilt. So those are the schools Vanderbilt is actually here in Nashville. So we like Embassy Suites, we think it's those are nice places to stay. Got a little manager's reception every evening got nice breakfast is in the morning. But that has nothing to do with our topic today he or does it? The reason I got this idea is I saw all the crazy games that they're playing, have time with fans, they pull out of the stands, and they play the games on the court and you do various different things. Maybe you go shoot some shots and have to return back quicker than the other person. It made me think, man, we've had some fun games for kids at church camps. And I want to formulate in my mind, what can we do that's a little bit more raucous. I mean, that's my southern pronunciation. If you look up the word a little bit more noisy, although it's similar in an environment maybe to plan Kahoot, where you get excited the kids get excited about answering questions write faster than the others in their classroom. Think about all that stuff. And I'm going to give you some ideas for some tools that take your substitute teacher day, beyond just handing out the assignments beyond just having some medium fun competition, and instead adding elements to it. That makes it super fun. And it's going to make them like it when you are back in their class. So you might be a little bit noisier, but I think they're going to learn more. That's my philosophy. I'll remind you that episode 176. This is episode 199. By the way, march 12 2023, day after my birthday, lots of stuff going on this month. If you look back to Episode 176, which is one of our top five most listened to episodes, really in the history of the podcast. So you all liked that game. today. Let me set the base. When my wife and I used to organize and run and participate in physically participate in church camps in our area. We found that we might get enough together to play baseball, soccer, whatever. But they always had the most fun with the games we made up the crazier, the better. My favorite one and you couldn't really do this in school. But if you're ever part of an outside activity or camp, we had a blast with this one. It involves water and it involves relays. So what we would do, we would have each team we give them one. There were like little construction hats made out of plastic, not real hard plastic, like a real construction hat. But when made out of plastic that's soft enough, you could actually poke a hole through probably a Halloween type construction, and we would poke a paperclip through that so that the end of the paperclip own twisted paperclip pokes through the top of the hat we tape it in so that in effect when somebody put on the hat, that pokey part of the paperclip would be sticking out of the top. And what we'd have them do is each one would take turns without carrying a water balloon. to that person wearing the hat, they would pop the balloon over them, which they thought was hilarious. And then they would sit down in the chair, take the cap, and then have the next person. They love that game because it was crazy, they got wet. It was a nice, hot summer day game. Now some of the games have seen here at the basketball tournament has given me some idea. So here's my first suggestion. This is musical chairs, okay, you know how to play musical chairs. Here's how you make it different. And here's how you help them to learn, I may want to mention, there's some teachers I can think of right now that would love be doing this in their class, if this is a class, brand new, you just kind of have to play that by ear, if you think they're getting too rowdy, you're just gonna have to play that by ear, you might mention to the teacher that you played this game before. But here's what you're doing. It's going to vary based on the arrangement of the chairs in your class. But just like any other musical chairs, maybe start out with five students. So you would put in four chairs, what you're going to do just like traditional musical chairs, or give it a name, that maybe mathematical chairs, whatever, give it a name, that may is you know a little bit closer in line with what is really going on in the class, you're going to play music, just like always, they're going to walk around the chairs while you're playing music, what you're going to do, or what maybe you have done in advance, I can there's two ways to do this, you're gonna either write like, if it's a math class, right problems on the board that they can solve, pull the screen down so that they can't see them at first, okay. Or maybe if you have access to the computer and to the overhead projector, you can type in some questions real quick project it and you know, just freeze a frame so that they can't see what the questions are going to be. But in effect, here's how the game would go. You'd play music, she was out whatever music you want. They marched around the chairs in traditional form. I'm watching myself as I described this, because I'm making motion with my fingers marching around the chairs, and then you stop the music. Now, here's what's going to happen. They don't just sit down right away, they you lift the screen to expose the questions, they run to your board, they find one of the questions they know the answer to and write the answer down on the board, they have to do all of that, then they go down and occupy the chair that they're supposed to. So you've still got the learning component in there. But you're also teaching them in a fun way. So it I can't describe it as fun as it is what they did in the basketball tournament. And I guess you could only do this in PE class, they actually had they marched around the chairs holding a basketball and then once the music stopped, they had to run to the basket shoe to lay up, make a layup come back and then sit down. So this this type on the whiteboard is similar in that maybe you have don't just have one problem. Maybe you have multiple problems that you project that they can go up as their walk as they're running, glance around and see which ones they think they want to solve. They write the answer, there's still that choosing component still might take a while to figure out what they want to do, then they run back to their chair. And you can do that several iterations. Of course, the example I gave you, you started with five. Now you're now you're going to cut it down to four, you take one chair out, cut it down to three, and I assume everybody knows how to play musical chairs. So that would be a fun game. I'm going to try it next week, probably I think I have both a middle school day and a high school day. This I would think this game tends to hover around middle school and lower. But I know the high school kids, I might try it with them too just to see that you have you have to really keep an eye out for the students because there are some that I probably did the same thing would have in school would try to cheat. They would try to walk slow so that they're closer to the whiteboard. They'll try to write their answer up real fast so they can get back quickly and you might not even be able to read it and then they just tell you what the answer is which may or may not be correct. So think about all that. But that's the first block this game you can play in your classroom, mathematical chairs, social study chairs, however you want to design it for the class you happen to be teaching at the time. Now this next game will require much less movement of chairs. and that type of thing, if you would prefer to do that, basically you assemble them in teams, you again are going to flash some kind of question up on the board, you give the team captain a foam, rubber ball. Maybe you even have, when you divide teams, you have them elect who their team captain is going to be. And when you flash the question on the screen, that Captain either goes up and solves the question themselves, or they can toss the ball to anybody on their team that thinks they know the answers so that they can catch the by of catch the ball first, run to the board do the problem, that one little bit more organized, you can keep your rows even. And it's very similar. In fact, you can prepare for as far as the questions goes in the same way. Hopefully you even have maybe a textbook you can refer to open up electronically. And maybe you can flash a question from there. And, in fact, you just keep it's a team sport, you keep track of the team points. But generally speaking, you could even if you've got the don't have access to like foam rubber balls, you can use a paper one for that matter. And that's another game you can play in the room. So the person with the ball can either go up and solve it, maybe even want to give them double points. If the person that starts with the ball goes up and solves it themselves, and then go down to regular points, if they have to throw it to another one of their team members to solve, that would be a lot of fun in the classroom as well. This last one that I mentioned takes probably a little bit more preparation. But maybe you've already done your substitute teaching enough that you have these prepared in advance, basically, you're going to put things and you can do it in chronological order, you could do it in numerical order, which is pretty much the same thing you're using the years instead of the Year version of the numbers. But here's what I picture you have is again, we split the team up into groups you give them, maybe you need two groups, you could do four groups, if you do four, you probably need four sets of five things that they can talk and hold on a sheet of paper, one item per student that they can hold, and it has some kind of event on it, like maybe the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the year that Christopher Columbus came to what he thought was America, all those kinds of things. And here's what you're going to do, you're going to mix them up, you're going to give the first person in line, the entire stack, and then have them give each member in their line a one of those sheets from your stack. And when you tell them to go, they go and here's what they do, when you say go, they have to flip over what's on their sign, maybe your captain, their captain can be in charge. And they have to move themselves, they have to physically move their team members so that the events that they have are lined up in chronological order. If you're in a math class, you can do some similar simple formulas that you know, maybe one equals three, one equals four, one equals five. And they have they have the formulas on their sheet and they have to move around so that their solutions are in numerical order. Basically what that does is it It strengthens their knowledge of events and how the events occur, what direction and that direction, what chronological order they occurred in. And I think that's a really fun game as well. It's team games, they get to stand up, they get to move around, there's going to be some noise, because there's going to be disagreements, some things, one thing comes first. And what you're going to do after that now you got to be really sharp with this you got to make sure that you know or have in front of you the list of what happened in what chronological order so that you can twit quickly tell them how many they have correct and give them a chance to correct themselves. Now I'll be honest, if if you just tell them the say you gave them six events, six students, and they've got four of them correct and two are out of order. Well, if it's high schoolers, maybe you can say okay, you've got four the six correct and then let them try to correct themselves. If it's younger students, you may tell them which four are correct and way, and that's gonna make it easy if it's just six, but let's say you had seven events, tell them which horse correct and then they had to put the other three and in chronological order or numeric order. That's a lot of fun. I've done all these versions of these games in a classroom, I even thought about, you know, the one where we talked about I learned in the basketball competition, you could bring in small like play skull or tykes type basketball, go with a soft basketball, maybe they can shoot a shot. And as soon as they shoot his shot there or make the shot, they could then solve a problem. So there's all kinds of games like this, I would encourage you, by the way to go to our substitute teachers lounge, Facebook group, if you've got some games like this, these are more than just the laid back games where you send to kids to the board and see who can solve a problem faster. These are games that will get them excited, will make the class fine. And what do you know, you might still learn something in the process. So think about it, give it a shot, play the raucous games. And I think your kids are going to be glad when you come back to substitute teach their class, because maybe that's good. Maybe that's bad. They might expect you to do these games all the time. But try these games, try ones that you think are a lot of fun and a little bit more raucous and a little bit noisy, but they're going to remember those and maybe you've helped them. Remember dates, and remember numbers and all that good stuff that makes the class a lot more fun and a lot more educational. And one more thought for you skeptics who think, Greg my students are already raucous enough. Well, let me tell you what, you can channel that noisiness that out of controllers into these activities, let them use their raucous pneus and let them use it for something productive, and you'll be amazed at how much better your class will turn out.