Out of the Bag

This review activity is great fun for your students and establishes a review procedure that students become familiar with so you can use it with ease over time.
To succeed with this strategy, assemble a durable bag and three different colored balls (foam, racquetball, rubber, etc.). Place the balls in the bag. During review time, without looking, students choose a ball out of the bag and answer a review question that corresponds with the ball color.
Here are a few sample questions:
What is one new concept you learned today?
What idea challenged your current thinking?
What new connections did you make between our topic today and your life?
How does what we learned today connect to what we learned yesterday?
The questions should be open-ended enough that you could ask multiple students to respond. You might want to avoid right/wrong questions unless you think there could be discussion among students about which answer is really correct.
The benefit of this strategy is that is provides a consistent activity for review. Once established, you don’t need to introduce and explain the activity. You can just pull out the bag and list the questions. Let the fun begin!


Classroom Engagement Tip for July 10, 2008