The tiny review activity

This review activity is super popular with my classes. So I thought I would share it here. It is so simple and fun that you can implement it with very little preparation at all!

Background

Here’s how I came up with the idea:

A while ago I joked to a colleague that my year 11s knowledge of Animal Farm was just about enough to fill a stamp. I was joking, of course. However, this conversation did remind me of a good friend from my university days. Pete was (and is) an artist.  He found great delight in being quirky and gauche and his best expression of this was the teeny-tiny notes left under my door, which needed a magnifying glass to be read.

 

The Tiny Review

I love using the tiny class review with my classes. Essentially, it has two review strategies rolled into one – summarising and questioning. The basic idea is that students summarise their learning onto a postcard… and then another student in the class has to respond in some way!

Here’s how it works

1. First: I ask students to summarise their learning (on whichever topic I need to cover) onto a postcard (usually a sheet of paper cut into 4!).
2. I collect these up. The second bit will depend on whether you have 2 classes studying the same topic.
3. To use with the same class: muddle them up and redistribute.
4. Then ask students to read the postcard they have been given, then form 2 – 3 questions on the summary to challenge or extend the ideas presented.
5. They write these on the back of the postcard. You can muddle them up with this Q & A going for as long as you have paper.
6. To use with a different class: complete the postcard summary task with both classes (it doesn’t have to be exactly the same day – as long as both classes have covered the subject areas) collect them in. At a relevant point, hand one set out to the other class and have them read and write questions as above.

What are the benefits of this activity?

It’s the perfect activity for an end of the day lesson when writing what feels like an essay in books can be quite a challenge. You can use any postcards at all of course. Most of the time, I just use scrap paper that I’ve torn up into 4.

One unexpected benefit of this review activity was the competitive nature of my classes, when we started off writing these postcards, they just wrote them. Then after a while, we started seeing who could write 30 words on a card, then 40, then 50. In time, my students became ‘tiny writers’ (just like my friend Pete) and were squeezing up to 100 words squashed onto one postcard. Just imagine my delight!

Competition and more

Added to that, the competition aspect increased when I started using this as an inter-class challenge. My students all knew each other and although they didn’t sign their postcards, they got a kick out writing exceptionally hard questions for their peers in the other class. This upped-the-ante for each class during each session we used this idea. It became crazy after a while. A couple of years ago, we got so into this activity that we even made an inter-class postbox!

Drop me a comment below if you try these ideas out and let me know how they went!

If you are looking for other fun and engaging activities to use in your ELA classroom, why not check out these blog posts:

The Perfect Review Game

One Amazing Debate Idea

Also, each week I send an email out to my teacher-friends, in this message, I include one classroom activity (like the perfect review game) and one literature activity (like this blackout writing activity). These tasks are fun, engaging, and will create brilliant learning moments for your students. If you would like to receive this weekly email (I send it on a Sunday morning – ready to help stave off those Sunday scaries), then all you need to do is fill out the email sign up below!