Category Archives for "Things I love"
I love this questioning and review activity, is it perfect for the Spring and Easter season to bring a little fun to my classroom.
An eggs-cellent idea!
It’s about this time of year that supermarkets and pound (dollar) stores fill up with Easter goods. These little plastic eggs are a fabulous and cheap addition to your teacher-toolkit! They are great because the eggs come in 2 halves so you can put stuff inside. In my local store, you can buy a set of 12 plastic eggs like this for £1.
So as you can imagine, I have a whole load of them.
Ways to use your eggs in the classroom!
1. Question eggs!
Place a different quiz question in each egg. Pass them around and get students to answer different questions from different eggs. All you need to do is to make a list of quiz questions on one page. Print and cut them into strips. You can create enough so that everyone has a different question or you can double up and have two sets circulating at once. This is a great way to review material in a low stakes test.
2. Challenge and reward eggs
Fill some eggs with rewards and some eggs with challenges to generate a little bit of engagement in your activities.
3. New learning eggs
Break up your new learning/information and place it into several eggs. Then get students to do an egg hunt to gather all the new information. So I would create 10 slips of paper with our new learning on. You can’t fit big pieces of paper in these eggs so you have to be concise. One strategy would be to number the slips and have students make sure they’ve gathered all of them. Or you could challenge your class by telling them there are 10 pieces of new information, they have to find them all and then get them into the correct order.
4. Analysis eggs
If you are teaching a text, then you could place quotations or textual references in different eggs for students to analyse.
5. Writing eggs
For a writing task, you could place new vocabulary, writing techniques, different sentence structures into the eggs and students to self-select to create a success criteria or rubric for their own writing. I might choose to be a little more structured and include specific elements I want to see in writing. For example, one might say ‘simile’, another ‘metaphor’, another ‘personification’. I might also include instructions like ‘an 8-word sentence showing emotion’. Another might state ‘a character with a sinister motivation’. I have these in a huge bowl at the front and I ask the class to take 3 – 4, then they write these down as their success criteria. They can then return them and choose more.
6. Word Eggs
Introduce new vocabulary by placing sentences on slips into the eggs. The new vocabulary word could be in capital letters. Students have to work out the meaning of the new vocabulary from the context of the sentence.
As you can see there are loads of different ways that you can use these plastic eggs in your classroom, just to add a little bit of fun and variety to your learning.
So if you see them in the shops this Spring, I would highly recommend picking while they are there! If you would prefer buying them online, then you can find them here:
US Amazon* UK Amazon*
*These are affiliate links. This doesn’t mean you pay any more or any less for the items shown. The price stays exactly the same. It does mean that I get paid a small commission if you buy these items using my link. It’s just enough to keep me going in cups of tea.
