PLEASE NOTE: MONDAYS WITH MARCINA HAS BEEN REVAMPED TO INCLUDE RESOURCES FOR ALL MEMBERS, REGARDLESS OF POSITION.
In this week's Mondays with Marcina, you'll find fun, interactive games you can use to "break the ice" with your students, transition from homework help to curriculum activities, or to end the day with lots of laughter. Also, check out the Tip of the Week.
Try these activities with your students. Let me know the updates by dropping a note in the Questions, Suggestions & Celebrations Box.
SILENCE
In Silence, silence is the name of the game. Students must arrange themselves in order without uttering a peep! For example, challenge students to silently sequence themselves according to height. The game can be adapted with very little preparation to fit almost any curriculum theme. For example, if the class is studying state capitals, count out enough sticky notes for each student. On each note, write the name of a state capital. Each student wears a "capital" tag on his or her shirt. The students must silently sequence themselves in alphabetical order. You might make the game even more challenging by asking them to line up according to the state for each capital!
Options: Students can create their own tags. They might write their birthdays on tags and arrange themselves in order from January 1 to December 31. They might write their seven-digit phone numbers as a seven-digit number and arrange themselves in numerical sequence.
Other categories: The possibilities are endless, but students might include U.S. presidents (arrange in order of the presidencies), fractions (arrange in order of size), clocks (arrange printed a.m. and p.m. clock faces in order of the time shown), or largest U.S. city populations (arrange tags with the largest cities and their populations from largest to smallest).
WHOZIT? WHATZIT?
These quick little puzzles can be great fun. When you have five minutes to fill, write a couple of the puzzles on the chalkboard and let students try to figure them out. Each puzzle contains several familiar words. When carefully read and sounded out, the words reveal the name of a well-known person, place, thing, or phrase. As students figure out the hidden names, they write their responses on a sheet of scrap paper. The teacher can wander the room checking their guesses. Have a prize ready for the first person to guess both of the day's puzzles.
Follow-up fun: After completing the puzzles below, students might like the challenge of creating Whozit? Whatzit? puzzles of their own.
SAMPLE PUZZLES:
*Tub Braid Heap Hunch (Clue: TV show) -- The Brady Bunch
*Sand Tackle Laws (Clue: fictional character) -- Santa Claus
*Tall Mischief Her Sun (Clue: person) -- Thomas Jefferson
*Buck Spun He (Clue: cartoon character) -- Bugs Bunny
*Shock Cussed Toe (Clue: person) -- Jacques Cousteau
*These Hound Dove Moo Sick (Clue: movie) -- The Sound of Music
*Docked Hearse Whose (Clue: person) -- Dr. Seuss
*Tight An Hick (Clue: thing) -- Titanic
*Aisle Oh View (Clue: phrase) -- I love you
*Chick He Tub Ban An Us (Clue: things) -- Chiquita bananas
*My Gulch Hoard Un (Clue: person) -- Michael Jordan
*Thumb Ill Key Wake Owl Licks He (Clue: place) -- The Milky Way Galaxy
PASS THE CHICKEN!
In this game, nobody wants to hold the rubber chicken -- the game's only prop! To begin the game, all students sit in a circle. Select one person to be It. That person holds the rubber chicken. The teacher or a "caller" says to the person holding the chicken, "Name five presidents of the United States. Pass the chicken!" As soon as the caller says, "Pass the chicken," the person holding the chicken passes it to the right. Students quickly pass the chicken around the circle. If it returns to the original holder before he or she can name five presidents of the United States, the holder is still It. Otherwise, the person holding the chicken when It finishes listing five presidents is the new It. You should prepare the topic cards for this game in advance. Topics can relate to your curriculum or be general information topics. The student who is It must name five items in the called-out category in order to get rid of the dreaded chicken!
SOME SUGGESTED TOPICS
*fast-food restaurants
*authors of children's books
*countries in South America
*sports teams
*things that grow in the desert
*vegetables
*cartoon charaters
*musical groups
*cereals
*rivers in the United States
*candy bars made with chocolate
*large bodies of water
*cities in California
Encourage kindness with a "Star Jar." Place on your desk a jar of stars cut out of construction paper. Whenever a student is caught in a random act of kindness, invite that student to the front of the room to write his or her name on a star and place it in the jar.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Comprehension Cards to use for all activities, including homework help.
Download ComprehensionCards.pdf
Additional Scripts and Resources for Academic Tutors directing Readers' Theatre.
Click here, especially if you have older students.
Hi can u post or send me the game that we were playing at the last training...sitting in a circle and passing the candy?...thanks!
Posted by: Teresa DInh | 11/30/2006 at 10:44 AM
Hey. Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.
I am from Austria and learning to read in English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "The difficult kick kick is fully effective for point bike topics."
Thanks for the help :-), Marina.
Posted by: Marina | 09/05/2009 at 01:58 AM