Using Discovery Education's PuzzleMaker

Here's a Hidden Message Puzzle you can put out on your Pick-Up Table Monday morning!
Click here.

(BTW, the hidden words in this puzzle are reuse, reduce, and recycle.)

Want to make more of your own?
Want to use the vocabulary you are teaching at the moment?

GO TO: Discovery Education and use their wonderful online Puzzlemaker.
Click here.

Wonderful website. Many different puzzles to make.

What fun!

CONSIDER THIS: Make a puzzle for your students! It could be a bonus page, a quiz, a pairs game or activity, a team game, or a test review.

The Sky's the Limit!

FRIDAY FUN!

One-Minute Mysteries

My good teacher buddy, Janet, loved to do this with her students when she had a spare minute.

Here's how this works:

Read a scenario. You know the answer. Your students get to ask yes or no questions to try to figure out the solution.

Good idea to recommend they start with general questions and narrow down to more specific questions.

Might be fun to make this a Team Game! Each team gets to ask a question and then take a stab at the answer. If they are wrong, then the next team gets a question.

You can purchase books of One-Minute Mysteries here.

Here is a website with over 100 Mysteries and the solutions.

EXAMPLE from the above website:

Mystery: Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice all live in the same house. Bob and Carol go out to a movie, and when they return, Alice is lying dead on the floor in a puddle of water and glass. It is obvious that Ted killed her but Ted is not prosecuted or severely punished.

Solution: Alice is a goldfish; Ted is a cat.

CONSIDER THIS: Add some Friday Fun to your classroom with One-Minute (or Two or Five!) Mysteries!

Moon Features Lab

The Moon Features Lab was one of my all-time favorites. For me AND for my students.

I had found some beautiful raised-relief moon maps in a new science classroom I was assigned to one year. They showed all the main features with labels--in raised relief, no less!

I quickly found a black and white map of the Moon's Features in some old science workbook. (No Internet back then, you understand.) And the rest, as they say, is history!

I wrote up a version of this lab and gave my students an entire class period to find and label their maps. I had a huge 5 feet by 5 feet moon map that I taped to the front wall. It had all the Moon Landings as well as all the Moon Features.

My students LOVED the lab and I know for a fact they never looked at the moon in the same way again! I ran into a student of mine years later and he talked about THAT lab. Still knew the Moon's features and was looking forward to teaching them to his own children. That and Moon Phases AND Constellations, all of which I had taught that year's classes.




I remember another teacher sharing my classroom that year, on my planning period. She got interested in the lab and asked if she could do it with her students. This was a teacher who almost NEVER did any active labs or activities! SHE LOVED IT! So did her students and she was more open to trying active learning labs the rest of the year.

CONSIDER THIS: Teach the Features of the Moon!

FUN LINKS: Go to YouTube and look for Moon Clips to show during the Lab. The further they get into the Lab, the more Moon Features they will be able to call out to you as they look at the images on your Big Screen or SmartBoard! YouTube has several Moon Landings which would also be fun to show!

Starry Skies has a great Moon Features Image you could project as well.

And you ABSOLUTELY have to go to Google's Moon Map!!

Paper Airplane Team Game

Here's a fun Team Game that would work great the day before a Big Test.

First, have each team make a paper airplane out of their team color. Click here for a good website for patterns and instructions. Give each team a piece of paper in their team color. They can choose an "expert" to make their favorite plane.

Establish a line at one end of the room. Have the teams line up behind the line. Or you can have one person per team come up to the line and the rest stay seated.

Put signs on different classroom objects that assign points, such as: chalkboard-5 points, teacher's desk-10 points, trashcan-20 points, etc.

Ask a Color Team a question and after a Team Huddle, the student in the front of the line answers for the team. If the answer is correct then that student gets a chance to throw their team's paper airplane and try to hit one of the target objects to win points.

Keep track of points and give the winning team a prizel such as: a free homework pass worth 10 points, or candy, or a new pencil, you name it!

The Questions could be similar to the ones on your test. They could be the exact Test Review Questions the students have already completed. They could be a review of what you've taught in the last couple of days.

CONSIDER THIS: Allow each student to bring their test review with them to the Team Game Table, which rewards those who do their homework!

CONSIDER THIS: Add a Paper Airplane Team Game to your arsenal of tricks!

Find Someone Who...

Find Someone Who... is a basic classroom team game.

If you Google it, you will find it all over the Internet. But mostly just as a First Week, get to know people, activity. Which is fine, don't get me wrong!

But it can be adapted to just about anything you are teaching and is a good, quick game that gets your students out of their seats and busy interacting with others AND trying to remember what they've learned lately.

Basically, you have about five things on a sheet of paper; such as:

Find Someone Who... (Basic First Week)

1. has lived in another state
2. has more than 3 siblings
3. speaks a language other than English
4. is taller than you
5. is an only child

OR

Find Someone Who... (Cloud Week)

1. can describe a cumulus cloud
2. can define "lenticular"
3. can list three "high" clouds
4. can sketch a cumulonimbus cloud
5. can list the weather associated with a nimbus cloud

OR

Find Someone Who... (Planet Week)

1. can list the four inner planets
2. can list the five outer planets
3. knows how Pluto is now categorized
4. knows what's in between the inner and outer planets
5. can list three unique characteristics of Earth

The rules are simple.

• You can sign a sheet only once.
• You can't sign your own sheet.

I absolutely loved getting my kids up and out of their seats for a quick leg-stretch. But with an educational goal in mind. If you have ever attended a teacher convention, think how you felt sitting all day listening to expert after expert talk-talk-talk. Exhausting work. Or think back to your college days!

How can we ask kids to sit quietly without fidgeting all day when it's hard for most of us to do the same!

Which is why I like to get kids up. If you don't trust yourself to get your students sitting back down in their seats quietly and quickly, you need to work more on classroom procedures. It IS possible to have kids up and down all period with a minimum of fuss and bother. It's just a matter of training them properly. Click here for more details on this.

CONSIDER THIS: Add more leg-stretching games such as FIND SOMEONE WHO. Make up a quick review game today and use it tomorrow!

FUN LINKS: click here for an example of Basic First Week.
Click here for an example of Find Someone Who Knows Safety.