Shake Up Semester Review

It's that time of year when most classrooms move into review mode, and I've seen or heard about some interesting approaches, including a review activity that merges Old Maid with prepositional phrases. If you are looking for a few ways to approach review in a new way, check out these ideas that I stole from my friend Chris.

Quiz-Quiz-Trade (No technology)
Write review questions & answers on notecards. Each student gets one notecard. Students get up, mingle, ask each other the quiz question, then trade their cards. They mix again, ask, trade...Continue until most students have asked and answered most questions. *BONUS: If the students write the review questions, they get double review in some ways AND have to process the information at a deeper level!

Partner Problems (No technology)Split a worksheet into 2 columns. (Typically this ends up being odds vs evens). Each pair of students gets one worksheet and one writing utensil. Fold the worksheet in half so only one set of questions shows. Partner A reads question 1 and explains the answer; Partner B agrees/disagrees and explains why; then, Partner A writes down the answer/work. Partner B takes the paper and pencil, flips the page and does the same with #2. Partners continue doing one problem at a time on their half of the paper, checking with the other student, and then writing down the answer until the entire worksheet is complete.

6 Slide Challenge (Technology)
Assign students different specific topics for review. Have them create a 6 slide Google presentation about their topic, and time each slide to last only 10 seconds. Students will present their slides to the class, but only have 60 seconds to explain the concept. (ex: literary terms, rhetorical devices, grammar concepts, etc.)

Socrative Space Race (Technology)
Lastly...Socrative, which I know many of you already use in some form.  Set up Space Race questions on Socrative.com. Students will login to your “room” that you set up, and compete to get their spaceship to the end of the track first. It’s like the carnival game where you shoot water in the clown’s mouth to move the thing up the pole… except that getting the correct answers is the water that moves your space ship. The first student or team that hits the end wins - or the team that gets the farthest, as you can’t get to the end unless all answers are correct.