If I was going to do this, I was going to go all out. I was going to make this week as awesome as possible. I started by thinking of how I could make this into an awesome competition for the students to do. The students were put into teams of 4 or 5 at random using Flippity for each rotation. These were the teams that they were going to have all week. Each day there was going to be a different "event" for the teams to participate in. There would be a winner for each event, but also 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. They would be assigned a number of points depending on what place they achieved in each event. The goal was to keep track of each team's point total throughout the week. At the end of the week, the team with the most points would be the champions. I even went out and bought some cheap little plastic trophies at party city for like $10 to give to the champions.
The next step was to figure out what events there would be. I came up with 4 events.
1. Group Quizizz
2. Relay Race
3. Kahoot Trashketball
4. Tic Tac Toe
Of course there is still math involved in all of these events. I just had to figure out what I wanted to do with them. Some of you may notice that there's only 4 events, and 5 days in a week. Well, I thought that one day during the week should be dedicated to building my students test taking stamina. I'll get into how I did that later. I'm going to go into detail of how I did each event, and what I used to make the events happen. It may be long, but I promise it'll be worth the read.
Monday:
The first thing I did was introduce the concept of the Math Olympics to each rotation. Immediately, I had their attention. The first job was to reveal their teams, and they had to come up with their team names. It's always funny to see what kind of names they come up with. My personal favorites were: Pink Fluffy Hulks (Hulk is my favorite super hero), Jamaican Turtles, Elite Denominators, & Math Minions (take a look at my classroom and you'll understand this one). All of the team names were unique. With their team, they would also design and create a flag to represent their teams. I started to notice that some of the team members who may not have been the most artistic were being left out. I adjusted on the fly, and decided to have them create a PicCollage on their iPad to represent their teams as well. They would submit the PicCollage, and I would create a QR code that linked to their PicCollage to put on their flag. This way the whole team was engaged, and everyone had a job.
I gave them about 30 minutes to work on this before I started the first event. The first event of the week was a Group Quizizz. If you don't what Quizizz is, it's this online review game that is very similar to a Kahoot, but it's a self-paced review. It shows questions and answer choices, and it gives the players a certain amount of time to answer question. The quicker you answer and get it right the more points you get. My kiddos love Quizizz, and they were excited to do it together in their teams. I decided that the topics I wanted in the Quizizz were 2 Digit Multiplication, Long Division, and Conversions. The great thing about Quizizz is the creator has the ability to take questions from previously made ones, and insert them into his/her own. I did this, and I quickly had a 25 question review game made in minutes.
The teams would use one iPad and work together to answer all of the questions. The teams were allowed to move anywhere they wanted. A lot of them moved into the hallway, corner of the room, or over to the rolly chairs. Basically anywhere they could hide the answers from another team. Once they began, they were required to pass the iPad after each question. This way each team member had the opportunity to answer a question. Of course, the team members could help each other with the questions. Overall, the teams did incredible. As the teacher it shows you the number of questions answered correct/incorrect. I have 4 class rotations, and each rotation, as a whole, answered above 90% of the questions correctly. Quizizz keeps score, and the results are shown at the end. There's really no extra work for the teacher when it comes to keeping score. The kids loved it! They were engaged, and this was only the beginning.
Tuesday:
The kiddos came back the next day super anxious to find out what the next event was. Tuesday's event was... a Math Relay Race. I took the teams outside and we were going to have a relay race. Well, we didn't just go outside and run around. I decided that I was going to incorporate STAAR questions from the test two years ago that still aligned with our TEKS. This was a great way to let the kids get exposure to the type of questions they would see on the test.
This is how the relay race worked. The teams lined up on one side of the parking lot. On the opposite side, there was a chair with a packet of the old STAAR questions. I would say go and the first person would take and run towards the chair. There job was to answer the question as fast as they could. Once they answered the question, they would run back and the next person would would run and do the same thing to the next question. The team that finished first earned 5 points. I emphasized, however, the importance of getting the questions correct. They just wanted to get the questions done with no regard for accuracy. I made the importance of getting the questions correct by saying that for each question right you earned 2 points. So, if a team finished first by missed over half the questions, they probably won't win the event. Once each team was finished, we went back inside and graded the packets. There's a little work when it comes to determining the winner for this event, but it wasn't too hard.
I think this may have been one of my favorite events. They loved it, and it was great practice for them! Overall, they did very well on the questions. The teams loved going outside. I even added the aspect of having to do 5 jumping jacks before you could answer a question. It was a very healthy competition ;)
Wednesday:
This was the day that I decided to have my kiddos work on their test taking stamina. The state released only half of the STAAR from last year, and I decided that I would have my students work these questions in class. I preached the importance of using their test taking strategies. You know, the ones that apply to all tests for all subjects not just reading or math. They need to make those thinking tracks, prove answers right or wrong, read the questions more than once, etc. They're only 10 years old, and they've only taken one year of testing. They still need practice taking tests, and this was a great way to do it. There were only 23 questions, but I wanted them to get familiar with what the questions would look like. We took three benchmarks during the year made by our district, and the questions on that were incredibly wordy and very difficult. After taking the benchmarks and to much of their surprise, the kiddos were shocked to see that the STAAR questions were a little easier to tackle than the benchmark questions earlier in the year.
I was incredibly impressed with the results of these practice questions. They did great! I scored each student's packet, so that they could see how they did. Like I said, I was very impressed and relieved to see these great results. I even had one student only miss three questions, and this was a kid who was in tutoring at the beginning of the year. I was so proud of him, and I emailed his mom to let her know what an amazing job he did on it.
Thursday:
This day was by far my favorite event of the week! It was awesome. We played Kahoot Trashketball. Even the name, to me, is exciting. I believe that most of us are familiar with Kahoot and how it works. Short version... It's an online review game where the question is projected on the screen and the kiddos have a certain amount of time to answer the question on their iPads or computers. Usually, they answer the questions and they are assigned points based on how fast they got it right. I decided to ignore the points in the Kahoot. I was going to use the Kahoot only as a means of projecting the question and getting quick responses. It also allows for me to see immediately who got the question right or wrong. The way the teams were going to earn points was through Trashketball. Trashketball is exactly what it sounds like. It's just like basketball, but the kids are shooting into a trash can instead. If the teams got the questions right, they earned the right to shoot for points. I used task cards, and uploaded them into the Kahoot and used them as the questions. The topics spanned the whole year's worth of information.
I lined up the trash can in the front of the room, and I moved the desks out of the way to make a shooting lane. I used pieces of tape to mark on the ground the different ranges for points. For example, if the kiddo shot from behind the 3 point line and made it, he earned three points for his team. They could make up to 4 points on one basket. It was pretty far shot to make 4 points. Of course, they all tried to shoot from back there in the beginning, but after realizing they weren't scoring any points, they wisely moved up closer.
It was awesome. They were so focused on answering the questions right because they wanted the chance to shoot the ball. The majority of the shots taken were from the 1 point range, but even then it was still hard to make the basket. It was so suspenseful each time a new person came up to shoot. Each shot was followed either by a groan or an extremely loud cheer. I'm sure my class was a little obnoxious this day. I had two roation winners that came down to the final shot. I had never seen one of my kiddos so focused and determined as he was taking that last shot. He nailed it by the way. The biggest cheer was when someone finally made the 4 point shot. He threw up the shot, it hit off the trash can, hit the whiteboard behind it, and bounced back into the trash can. The whole class erupted in cheers! It was hilariously awesome. The kids loved this game! I was very pleased with how this game went.
Friday:
To finish off the week, I decided to do an outdoor Tic Tac Toe game. This was an interesting game to plan for. I used chalk and Lego pieces. The chalk was to make the tic tac toe board on the concrete, and the lego pieces were used as the "Xs and Os". The math aspect was word problems from our Envision books. There's an end of 4th grade assessment that I used from the book, and it had word problems that covered all of the topics from the year.
The game worked like this. Each team had a packet of questions. Each page represented the questions for a single game. The first page was for game one. The objective is to answer the question in the packet. If they get the question right, a person from the team runs to the tic tac toe board drawn on the ground and lays down the Lego piece in the spot they choose. They run back, and the next person on the team does the next question. They do this until they get three in a row just like in normal tic tac toe.
This game required "jobs".
Writer: The team member is answering the question
Runner: Team member who runs and puts the Lego piece down
Checker: The team member who checks to see if the answer is right or wrong
Strategist: Team member who is figuring out where to put the Lego pieces to win the game.
After each question, the team members are rotating the jobs between the team. The writer becomes the runner, the runner becomes the strategist, the strategist becomes the checker, and the checker becomes writer. The keep rotating until the game is won.
The packet was designed for seven games. I would have two separate games going at one time. I would keep track of how many games each team had won. It was pretty intense to see them sprinting to play tic tac toe. There were a lot of upset teams when the opposite team would block them. It was fun, and I think the kiddos really enjoyed this game as well.
This video is when one of the teams won their particular tic tac toe game.
After this event was over, we went back into the classroom and I calculated who the overall champion would be. Each rotation was so anxious and excited to see who won. The winning teams earned tickets, ice cream passes, and a little plastic trophy. You would have thought that I gave them gold. It was cool to see how excited they got when they winning teams found out they won. I will also say get ready for some sad kiddos of the teams who don't win. We're all a little competitive on the inside. ;)
Overall, this was an incredible week. I loved it, and I really think that the kiddos loved it too. There is nothing more important than fostering a love of math in my students. Math is probably not the most loved subject in school. I love math, and my hope is that my love of math is rubbing off on them. When they finally leave my classroom for the last time, I hope they like math more than when they first came entered the room way back in august. Half of the battle, to me, is not giving up with math and having someone who can make you enjoy doing it. That's my job, and I love it.
The STAAR test is here. It's happening, and there is nothing else that I can do to prepare them for it. They're ready. They may not think they are, but they are. I'm in their heads, and they'll hear me while they're taking their test with different strategies and tips that we have practiced with. They know all that they need to know, but now it's a matter of them doing what they're supposed to do. I'm sure that I'll be a nervous wreck tomorrow, but I know they'll be fine. I want them to do well and succeed more than anybody. All I can ask is that they do their best. I'm still going to love each of them once the day is over. This test doesn't define them or the year they had in my class. I know who they really are, and I know how far all of them have come.
This is my first group of kiddos, and I have loved every minute of being their teacher. We have worked our butts off to learn and grow together. I have learned so much from working with them. I can't wait to see the results because I know they'll all rock it!
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