Christmas Crazies

We have officially entered the time before Christmas that I like to call "The Christmas Crazies". This is the time of the year when my students are just itching for Christmas break and have a hard time concentrating on the concepts that I'm trying to teach them. So, in order to contain my Christmas crazy students, I like to implement fun games and activities that will grab their attention (and hopefully keep it for a good amount of time) during this difficult time of the year.

The first game that I introduced to my students this week is a game called "Math Madness". This game involves two teams of students solving addition problems as fast as they possibly can. One student on each team would start it off by running forward to solve an addition problem on the poster board quickly, then run back to their team, hand off the marker, and then the next student would run forward to solve another addition problem. Once the team had all of the addition problems finished, they sat down on the ground to show me their team had finished. I would then check the answers on their team poster board to decide if they were officially done and had won the game. The fun thing about this game is that we can erase the number in the middle and do it over and over again with new addition problems each time. Here is a quick video with our second graders in action with "Math Madness". They loved this exciting math activity since it really got them moving quickly (while inadvertently practicing their math facts).

The other activity that I introduced this week I had heard about through Mr. Parks (thanks Mr. Parks!)...Plickers. Plickers is a website/app that we can use to review certain concepts to determine whether or not we have learned what we should have learned throughout the unit/chapter. I used Plickers with some of our social studies concepts this week since we have a unit test coming up quickly (Monday!). In order to use Plickers, each student has a special "answer card" where they turn it in different directions to answer a, b, c, or d.  For each question, I display the question and the multiple choice answers on the Apple TV, then students make their choice and hold up their answer card. To record student answers, I scan each card with my iPad camera using the Plickers app and this automatically gives me data telling me which students got the question correct and which students need more help in understanding certain concepts. The students really got involved in answering questions and Plickers made review so much more entertaining for them as they got to participate and cheer each other on. Here is a video of our second and third graders participating in our first ever Plickers activity.

These two interactive activities have really helped us with "The Christmas Crazies" and we hope to implement a few more engaging activities this coming week to keep the craziness at bay! :)