Engaging Students Through Games: Reviewing

I teach classes with ARC out in my community. One of our classes is an after school club at the middle school. Once a week, my supervisor and I are teaching the children lessons that are broken down into two parts - first they learn about natural disasters, how they occur and why. Second we teach them how they can be prepared for common natural disasters in the area. On our last day of the club we wanted to do something that really engaged the students but also provided a cumulative review of all the information they had learned.

We decided to create a Jeopardy game. Six categories with five questions for each category. We placed the pieces of paper on the whiteboard. When a student got a questions right, they got to hold onto the paper that had the point value on it. At the end, they counted up their points and the one with the most points got to pick their prize first.

It is important for me to mention that I do not support using food as a prize. I also believe that it is important that if one student gets a prize, so do all the rest. The key here was the one with the most points got to pick first.

This game did not take that much prep time either. We have saved all of our lessons so when we walked through the information we pulled questions and hand wrote them out. The only thing that took time was setting up the game on the whiteboard, I would suggest having this already set up to cut down on transition time.

The students loved the game and got really into it. They were taking ownership of what they have learned. Before they left class I asked them to tell me one questions they missed and they answer - this showed me that even if it was a "review" game, they were still learning. I would use this technique again!

Six Categories, Point Value/Question Under

Each point value can be taken off to read the question, the point value paper goes to which ever student got the question right.

The way your game will look. Questions still up there for repetition.