Teaching Middle School ELA
Welcome to the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, where we are dedicated to helping English Language Arts teachers create dynamic and engaging lessons for their students, while also managing the day-to-day responsibilities that come with being a Middle School ELA teacher.
As educators ourselves, we understand the challenges of finding a work-life balance that allows us to pursue our passion for teaching while also enjoying our personal lives. That's why each Tuesday, hosts Caitlin Mitchell and Jessica Cannata share practical and innovative solutions for managing your workload and staying inspired in your teaching practice.
Whether you are looking for fresh ideas to inspire your students, strategies for improving your writing instruction, or tips for managing your time more effectively, this podcast is designed to provide you with the tools you need to thrive as a Middle School ELA teacher.
Join us each week for curriculum and lesson ideas, classroom stories, and interviews with fellow educators who are experts in the field. We believe that with the right support and resources, you can create a classroom environment that encourages students to become strong and passionate learners.
If you teach reading and writing to middle schoolers and want to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in ELA education, then this is the podcast for you! Tune in every week and let us help you make a difference in the lives of your students and in your own teaching career.
Teaching Middle School ELA
Episode 298: From Boring Review to Begging for More: Three Low Prep Games to Add to Your Lessons this Year
On this episode of The Teaching Middle School ELA Podcast your hosts Caitlin, Jessica, and Megan are sharing insights on turning mundane review sessions into exhilarating and interactive learning moments! You'll learn three low-prep, high-engagement games that are perfect for reviewing any concept in any subject time and time again. They begin by discussing the exhaustion from stale repetitive review methods like Jeopardy or Kahoot and introduce each game with details on exactly how you can easily implement them into your next lessons.
3 low-prep review lessons you'll love:
Hot Potato
Mystery Baskets
Silent Auction
These games not only reinforce academic concepts but also encourage strategic thinking and collaboration. The best part is how versatile these games will prove to be as you can utilize them with many different ELA reviews throughout the year. These engaging activities will have your classroom buzzing with energy and excitement. Tune in to energize your review sessions and create memorable moments for your students!
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Welcome back to another episode.
Speaker 1:You guys, today we are here talking to you about taking boring review to begging for more, and this is a great episode, all about three low prep games that you can add to your lessons this year.
Speaker 1:So if the review games that you've used in the past are starting to feel a little stale and boring, like things come up for me like Jeopardy we've used that a hundred times Kahoot always gets a little wild. And then also like let's you know we can find something else to add to the repertoire, right? This episode is really going to inspire you to add three new games to your lessons and I want you to think about these as we go through them. These are some of those rinse and repeat activities, just like we preach here at EB, that you can use over and over again. So these games are going to inject fun and energy into your lessons. They are designed to boost engagement, reinforce key concepts and make the lesson enjoyable, not just for your students, but for you too, quite frankly, because, quite frankly again, I'll say that twice in a row it can get pretty boring to teach the same stuff year after year and do the same thing over and over and, over and over again.
Speaker 1:I got to a point with that. With some of the American Lit that I was teaching, I was like, okay, do we really have to read Anne Brown straight again? But that's okay.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's a good point too, because even if your content can't change, just putting in a game like this can feel like you're switching it up yes, totally, a hundred percent, as opposed to just doing it the same way over and over.
Speaker 1:And I hear that a lot from our EB teachers. They're like, yeah, you know I did all of this this year, but I'm going to switch it up a little bit next year just to make it spicy, just make it, to make it a little bit more fun, and I just love that perspective, like why the heck not?
Speaker 1:You know, yeah, all right. So this first activity is called hot potato. It is ridiculously easy to set up. So you're simply going to divide your students into small groups, give one student in each group something that's going to act as the potato in the game. So this can be as simple as like a balled up piece of paper, right, use something that can be tossed around, right? So this activity can be used in a variety of ways.
Speaker 1:First, you can have a list of review questions that are ready to go. These can range from vocabulary words and their definitions to comprehension questions about a text, to anything in between, and you will simply ask the first question, provide some wait time and then instruct students to play hot potato, passing around the waddled up ball of paper or whatever it is that you're using as your hot potato, and you will play music while they pass and when the music stops, you will have that student share their answer. So, just like typical hot potato, right, and this is great because we're doing review questions and it's fun, right? It just adds a little bit of like that. I'm not going to say this properly, but let Jenna say qua, right, whatever that thing is in French. That just just amplifies a little bit Right, um, and so an alternative with this is to give students a bunch of critical thinking questions, so think ones that you would use for like a Socratic seminar, like those types of questions and give students time to jot down their talking points to the questions or have them find some evidence to support their reasoning, and then, in small groups, you would have them play this game with Hot Potato, but here, when the music stops, have the student who's holding the waddled up paper share their response based on what they'd already written down.
Speaker 1:So you've given them time to think about their answer to a more in-depth critical response, as opposed to just like a basic recall review question or something like that. So you're likely going to find that there's actually a lot of things to like about this game. So, first, all of your students are involved in the game the entire time, right, so they're in a group, but everybody's participating because they're all passing. The thing it makes me think of have you watched the Bluey episode, megan? You probably haven't, but just never watched a Bluey.
Speaker 2:My kids don't watch it.
Speaker 3:I know, I know, oh my God, bluey's the best I've heard, but yeah, they're not into it or like, well, they've never really tried.
Speaker 2:I shouldn't say that, Okay Well the parents who watch Bluey.
Speaker 1:You guys are going to know this episode that I'm talking about. So there's the, there's the way, this way that they do like, um, like a birthday gift on Bluey, where the parents will wrap this one gift with a ton of wrapping paper. So they'll do like one layer, two layers, three layers, four layers, five layers, and the kids will sit in a circle and pass the gift around and when the music stops they take off the first layer of wrapping paper and whoever gets the gift at the end, when there's no more wrapping paper left, gets the present. Does that make sense? Yes, what?
Speaker 2:I just said.
Speaker 1:But is it for like? So the birthday kid doesn't get the present. So that's what's interesting. So the very first episode, one of the parents were all putting a toy within each layer of the wrapping paper, so no kid felt left out. And then there was this dad who was like I'm not doing it that way. He's like I'm doing it the old way, the way that we did it when we were kids. Were not everybody's always a winner, right, like that whole thing. And so he, he does it at the this next birthday party for Bluey and her friends and all of the kids who didn't time out.
Speaker 2:You just blew my mind Bluey's a girl.
Speaker 1:Yes, I was about to ask the same question, and so is Bingo.
Speaker 3:Don't even know who Bingo is, but okay, it's her little sister. Oh, my God, I love her.
Speaker 1:It's so cute. So, anyways, the dad does this and the mom is like that's a bad idea. All the kids are going to be upset with you. All the parents are going to hate you, right? So he only wraps one present, as opposed to all of the kids getting the gift. So they play it the old school way and all of the kids who don't get the gift are bawling upset. So sad, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. But then, like long story short, the kids learn how to not always get a gift, right. So it actually is like this cute little lesson when all is said and done. But this makes me think of that, because all of the kids are so anticipating whether or not they're going to get the gift. Same thing with this Like the kids are so all anticipating whether or not they're going to be the one that the music stops on that they got to answer the question Right, so they're paying attention to what's happening. That was a total tangent.
Speaker 3:I like it. It was great.
Speaker 1:We learned something for sure. Yep, bluey is a girl. That just blew your mind. You're welcome for that.
Speaker 1:So my point with this was all students are involved in the game and you can ensure that everybody has a chance to participate and contribute to the discussion. So you might even want to come up with a rule that states that if the hot potato lands in the hands of a member of the group that's already answered a question, then that student just has to pass it to the next person in line and then you can start fresh after every few questions, or whatever it might be. You could also consider keeping students on their toes by adding in bonus tasks during certain rounds. So, for example, you can give students a heads up that during the next round, the person to the left of the student who shares their answer must also build onto the answer with a piece of evidence on their own. So they got to be ready to go and thinking on their toes because that student could have taken their evidence. They got to come up with something else on their own, or you can use the vocabulary word in a sentence, or whatever the case may be, depending on what kinds of questions your students are answering, so you can just take it to the next level Highly. I would recommend that for like your eighth graders for sure.
Speaker 1:And what's pretty cool about this game is that it incorporates music and movement and these two things enhance retention. And research shows and we can link this article for you guys it's from Stanford. Research shows that incorporating music into learning activities can significantly enhance memory retention and we all probably know this. But, for instance, there was a study that was conducted at Stanford's University School of Medicine that found that music engages brain areas involved in paying attention and prediction and memory updating, and this means that music can actually help students better focus and organize information and this is going to improve their ability to remember what they have learned.
Speaker 1:And I'm going to tell a little side note story here. Is that okay? Yeah, so when I worked for clear channel media and entertainment, all of the radio stations have a call sign, like kiss, fm, kiss and K fog is in San Francisco, whatever. I was tasked with memorizing all of the call signs for all of the radio stations all across the country that we had. So like I needed to know in, like Milwaukee, the call signs for all eight of our radio stations, and they're all four letters of like KXLM or KXFI or whatever Isn't like if you're.
Speaker 2:West of the Mississippi they start with K, but if you're East it's something.
Speaker 1:W.
Speaker 2:That's like random trivia in my head right now yes and so.
Speaker 1:I'm trying, megan, are we?
Speaker 3:teaching you something new again. So many things today, so many new trivia facts.
Speaker 1:No, I remember. I'm like there's no freaking way I am ever going to remember all. And they would quiz me. They would quiz me. My boss would take me into his office. It was the worst. Like, let's just be honest, it was the worst and I'm so thankful that it happened, because everything happens for a reason and I was like I need to make a song so that I can remember all of these call signs and, long story short, I never made the song and I quit. So that's the story for that.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm just thinking it does work, though, cause I look at Jameson and he can name the 50 states and capitals like this, cause he knows the Animaniacs song on YouTube and he watched it in second grade and, like, learned it.
Speaker 1:All the prepositions yeah Aboard about above, across, against, along, around, amid, among, after, at, except for during, down, right, yeah, that was great. I'll add that to my fifth graders. Okay so, anyways, that was great, I taught that to my fifth graders. Okay so, anyways. By integrating music into classroom activities like the hot potato game, you can start to leverage these cognitive benefits to enhance students' learning experiences, and that makes this game one of those ones that it will be happy to rinse and repeat throughout the school year. Students are going to love it as well.
Speaker 1:And the last thing is that this review activity is super low stakes. Right, it's super low stakes. It's fun. They're together, they're in a group, and that can really help to reduce some of the pressure and anxiety that students might feel when answering a question in front of their peers. So, since they had that wait time, or you even gave them that opportunity to prepare their answers in advance, they're going to be ready to go in their small groups. They're going to be comfortable sharing with their classmates, as opposed to being put on the spot with a review game or something along those lines. So fun activity, hot potato. Use it with your kiddos.
Speaker 2:Hey, the next activity is called mystery baskets, and this one does require a little bit more prep than hot potato, but it is so worth it Like your students really will beg you to play this again and again. And once you teach it to your students, then you can, you know, use it multiple times. It's much easier. So, really, the prep is just up front, but what y'all are going to have to do is gather a bunch of baskets or containers and these can really be anything that you find around the school. They can be an empty, clean trash can, it can be a bowl you might have in your class for snacks, a vase, a laundry basket where sports equipment is held, like whatever you have on hand and then under each basket or container, you're going to place a post-it note with a different number on it, so you could do like 1, 5, 10, 20, negative 5, negative 2, negative 10,. You know whatever you want. I wouldn't really go higher than 20, though, and these are going to be point values, and what you want to make sure is that your students don't see those numbers on the post-its under the baskets, right. Hence the name mystery baskets.
Speaker 2:So then you divide your students into teams about four to five students per team and each group needs to get a set of colored manipulatives. Again, these can be anything, so you could just use you know four or five different sheets of construction paper and cut out little squares for them. You don't have to like make sure you have four orange balls or four red balls or anything like that. You just want to make sure that each group has their own color and that, whatever they're using, they either have fewer than the number of baskets or more than the number of baskets. And then you give your class a question to answer, and it can be anything that you're studying in class, so it could be grammar focused, it could be comprehension, it could be vocabulary words, it could have to do with a novel, like honestly anything. And each group will quietly come up with their answer and call you over to check it, and if they're right, then they get to go, take one of their manipulatives and place it in any of the mystery baskets. If they're wrong, they don't get to do it. And you continue doing this until you've gone through all the questions and at the end you reveal how many points each basket is worth by showing students the post-it note under each basket and then they can tally their points and figure out, you know, who's the winner.
Speaker 2:So if you play this game again later in the year, all you want to do is, kind of you know, move the Post-its around so they don't know oh, the laundry basket is always 10 points or whatever and you'll notice that students are going to be motivated to come up with quality answers because they don't know. Even if they get the answer right, they better hope they're not putting it in like the negative two basket right. And because they're working in teams, they're practicing collaboration, they're communicating with each other. They're reasoning like should we spread our manipulatives out? Are we going to, like, take a risk and put them all in one basket Like, what's their strategy? So it's really cool to see how they work together and it just makes it fun for them.
Speaker 2:And that's the bonus of the critical thinking skills that they're using here. Right, you're not just reviewing the concept, but it's like the strategy of how they're gonna win the game. And what I like about this is that you're there to provide immediate feedback to them because they're showing you the answer right away. You, immediate feedback to them because they're showing you the answer right away You're looking it over and saying, yes, you get to put you know a ball or whatever in a basket, like they know right away if they are correct or not, and then you could have a group share their correct answer out and model it, or you could work with the group who didn't get it and help them later on. So again, this is a great activity mystery baskets. Use it with any topic. Even if it's not ELA, it works for any subject as well and I just love it.
Speaker 3:I think your students are going to love it as well. That's a fun one. So I have the last low prep game to share, and this one, I think, is my favorite. It's called Silent Auction, and it's very appropriate that you chose me to share this one, jessica, because I have good family friends who literally own an auctioneering business, and like they're so impressive I and like they're so impressive I mean you've heard like a good auctioneer right Like they're so impressive to hear them doing their auction thing. I cannot do it, so I will not on this podcast, but super fun.
Speaker 3:So for this one, each small group needs to have a paddle. Right, you've been to an auction, you're holding up your paddle. You could use a piece of colored paper for this, but like fly swatters would also be very fun. Kind of Spotters would also be very fun. Kind of adds a new fun element there. So for this review activity, all you need to do is come up with your review questions and, just like the other two activities that we've shared, you can use any ELA topic that you're currently studying in class. So you're going to want to divide your students into small groups and give each of those groups a paddle or whatever you're using to represent that paddle and then just explain to students that they will be bidding on answering various questions. So, for example, you might say the following question is worth five points how many synonyms can you come up with for the word small? Let's start bidding at three synonyms and if you are an auctioneer you could start, you know, doing the auctioneer thing. Then each group that thinks they can name three synonyms would raise their paddle in the air. Then you say do I hear four synonyms, five synonyms, et cetera, until only one group remains with their paddle in the air. And then you allow that group to answer the question and if they get it correct, you award them five points. If they don't get it correct, you can kind of decide what. What you do if they get it wrong, um, you might take off a negative amount of points, or maybe you'll let another group attempt to answer it for a smaller amount of points, something like that. You can just kind of decide that on your own. If more than one group still has their paddle up in the air, they can quickly write down their answers and then share with you to see if they get awarded the points. So then you're going to continue asking questions and coming up with the different point values until your time is up, and it's really helpful to just have a student kind of keeping a running tally on the board for each group score to kind of keep track of that.
Speaker 3:So here are some other examples of questions you might use in your silent auction. This question is worth seven points. How many different parts of speech can you identify in the following sentence? The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Let's start bidding at three parts of speech. Another question might be this question is worth nine points how many literary devices can you find in this sentence? She sells seashells by the seashore. Let's start bidding at two devices. And then another one might be. This question is worth 12 points.
Speaker 3:Identify as many elements of the plot structure as you can from our latest story.
Speaker 3:Let's start bidding at three elements.
Speaker 3:So if I lost you for a second there I know that was a lot of questions Make sure to come back and focus again, because these next two questions that I'm going to share are a little different than the others, so they're a little more open-ended and you might just need to switch up the structure of the auction a little bit for these. So the first example would be this question is worth nine points what does the old oak tree symbolize in the story we read yesterday? And another example would be this question is worth 10 points. Compare and contrast the themes of two poems we read last week. What are the similarities and differences? So for questions like these that are a little more open-ended, you can once again just allow any group that wants to participate to jot down their answers and then read them aloud to you. That way, no group is copying from another group. And if a certain group is nervous to participate because they don't want to lose points based on an incorrect answer, then they don't have to participate in that round if they don't want to.
Speaker 2:That's a fun one.
Speaker 2:So I used to use silent auctions in my class all the time, Like kids love this and it's. It's really so easy, right, Cause you have the review questions usually already done for you, even in a textbook, and I could just use those but just make it fun. But what I like to do at the end was like a final jeopardy round. So we had all our scores and then students could say, okay, I'm willing to wager 20 points out of my score or whatever for this final question, and I might give them like a teaser of like what the question might be about. Like maybe it's about plot, but that's all they know.
Speaker 2:So they make their wager, Then I ask the question and then they answer it, and then if they get it right, of course they get those points. Or if they get it wrong, you know they lose all the points. And again it really makes them strategize like how much should we wager? Are we willing to risk it all? And it just adds that element of like there's never a clear winner until like it's truly over. So just a fun little thing to add.
Speaker 1:Yes, I love that. So the three games that we discussed were hot potato, mystery baskets and silent auction, and these are all designed to boost engagement, to reinforce key concepts and really make learning enjoyable for your students and for you as the teacher. So these games provide a break from the routine, from the mundane. They allow students to review material in a low-stakes, collaborative and dynamic way, and by incorporating these activities, you're not just adding variety into your teaching methods, you're also setting the tone for a classroom where learning is both fun and effective. It can be both, and it's not either or. So your students are really going to appreciate the effort, effort right To make a lesson enjoyable for them, and you'll likely find for yourself, too that you're just more energized, you're more engaged as a teacher like that. It lights you up to be able to be in class and do things like that with your kids too. So, whether you're listening to this at the start of the new school year or you're midway through the year and this is like just that much needed energy booster consider how these games can really enhance your lessons and contribute to fun, productive classroom environments. And also these are those rinse and repeat activities that you can just go to time and time again.
Speaker 1:All right, you guys. Thank you so much for joining us this week on the podcast. Next week we are going in a little bit of a different direction. We're talking about games as much, but like still also um, we're going to talk about creating learning targets that include the school custodian, news reporters and heck a whole lot of fun. So we will see you guys next week on the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us this week, you guys, and we'll see you guys later.