Lots of Fun

Yesterday and today were early release. So, we saw two classes each day for a longer amount of time than usual.

We took the students to the computer lab to use an internet site that the school uses, called Study Island. It asks the students questions about what they are studying. In this cases the geography of Africa. After they did a certain amount (decided by Mr. Dorray) they were able to play in game mode. This means that after they get a question right they get to play a short game. So, they are still studying, but get to have some fun.

Then we went back to the classroom and played a review game. We projected a map of Africa onto the white board and quizzed the students. I would give them the name of either a country or physical feature and the first person to raise their hand got to come up and draw it on the board. If they were right they got a piece of candy. I wanted everyone to get a turn, so once a student won they could only go again if no one knew the answer (this didn't keep them from raising their hand and trying to get picked).

They seemed to know the material, so hopefully they will do well on their test tomorrow.

The students enjoy Study Island, and they really seemed to enjoy the review game. (I will definitely use this in the future!) Some of the students even told me at the end of the day yesterday that they really liked the review game and wanted to do it again.

I had a great time because the kids were so enthusiastic. They had fun and made me laugh. Great two days!

Skits

Today I split the class into groups of about 5-6 to prepare skits. They were to explain a part of the government of Saudi Arabia to the rest of the class.

It went OK. However, there were a lot of issues within the groups. I split them by having the students count off 1-5. So, first student says 1, that's their group. Student next to them says 2, that's their group. And so on. I thought it would help randomly assign then and keep the friends away from each other. I not sure how well that worked, because then people who didn't get along were together and didn't want to work.

I did two Minor Incident Reports (when the student has 3 of these they get a referral) while the students were in their groups. One was for a girl who called another student "gay". And, the other was for a student who told another to "F off". Of course he didn't just say the letter F. They will both get to enjoy silent lunch.

Some of the teams did really well. One student did a great rap with the support of his team. Most did not do so well, and I am pretty sure most of the students did not learn much. There was also a writing portion of the class where they wrote home while on vacation in Saudi Arabia, about how different Saudi Arabia was from the United States. By reading their letters, I know that most of them learned that women cannot vote in Saudi Arabia.

So, I learned a lot from the experience, and if I do skits again it will be done differently.
Tomorrow I am trying a jigsaw. More on that later...

Word Carousel

To help them review for the test, the students participated in a word carousel review game today. In this activity the teacher uses Super Sticky Notes and places them around the room:

We put up seven and titled them with the topics they have been learning about: 

History of the Middle East

Geography of the Middle East

Social Issues in the Middle East

Middle Eastern Economics

Christianity

Islam

Judaism

The students were split into seven groups and got 30 seconds at each Super Sticky Note to put down any words or ideas that they could think of about each topic. 

Once they got back to their original Sticky they circled the best 7 words. Then they made a sentence out of those words to summarize that topic. The best sentence (chosen by myself and Mr. Dorray) won that team a prize (candy).

This was a pretty fun activity and it was very interesting to see how well each group did, and what topics the students had problems with.