Are you looking for easy ways to increase student engagement and assess learning without spending a ton of time grading and working through complicated rubrics? Let me introduce 5 quick-win activities I’ve used successfully in my ELA classroom. Try out these ideas at the beginning of class for morning work or use them at the end of a lesson as an exit ticket.
Mystery of the Week
Challenge your students to solve a mystery each week using clues you provide. To start, come up with four clues to your answer. I’ve used a person or character from our reading, a place or story setting, vocabulary word, or literary device. Clues can be word hints, images, quotes, coordinates to a location – the sky’s the limit. You’d be surprised at how engaged and excited students become trying to solve the mystery!
Decide on the rules and method of answering you want your students to use. Be sure to think about how many guesses you want each student to have. I recommend only two. To submit a guess, students post their answers on Google Classroom, your learning management system, or write out answers on a notecard and turn them in. The student who first solves the mystery wins and is announced at the end of the week. Offer a simple reward like a small treat, homework pass, or something creative that matches your individual teaching situation.
Learning Liftoff!
This exit ticket is best used at the end of a lesson when you have introduced new concepts or ideas. Students will write down:
4 Facts, observations, or insights about what they learned
3 New words or terms they learned or heard
2 Ways the information connects to them or their world
1 Question they still have about the topic
Use notecards, sticky notes, or an electronic message board like Padlet for student responses. Follow up with a turn and learn opportunity or whole-class discussion.
Question Quick Think
Step up your vocabulary game using Question Quick Think. You give students the “answer”, which is a vocabulary word or subject-specific term from the lesson or unit of study. Their job is to write three questions for which the answer is the assigned word. Have some fun and include holiday/seasonal words.
Here is an example:
The word is INACCURATE
What should your answer in math never be?
What is a synonym for the word wrong?
What should a news reporter avoid being?
Testing 1-2-3
At the end of class, have your students create one to three “quiz” questions about the day’s lesson including the correct answer. At the beginning of class the following day or during the week, pass out the questions (make sure no one gets their own) and have the students answer them for review. Another way to use this idea is to collect all the quiz questions and create a practice test in Google Forms or add them to a presentation.
Happening Hashtags
After teaching a lesson or new concept, students write two or three hashtags to demonstrate understanding. This also works well as a response to reading activity, too. Create a shared Google doc where students post their ideas. #brianlearnstosurvive #similescompare
What are your favorite go-to activities to increase student engagement and asses learning? I’d love to hear what works in your classroom. Get more teaching tips and ideas like these when you visit Straight Outta Class and ELAMatters blog.
