It’s been a minute since I have blogged but we all know that April and May are the most exhausting months of the year because we go so long without any breaks. I personally found myself planning and attending event, after event…..after event, after event! I am finally swimming with my head above the water and I have 5 more days left of school with 3 of them dedicated to final exams.
Final exams are something I don’t actually hate. I know that everyone has their own opinions on it, but I like them better than giving a project at the end of the year because so many classes give projects. Honestly, I don’t want to grade projects with summer knocking on the door. I don’t want to deal with kids being absent and having to make it up. We have done many successful projects this year and my kids are DONE. They have checked out. They find everything to be boring. So last week I decided to prep as many games and activities for exam review as I possibly could so we could have a really fun last week of school filled with high engagement and minimal classroom management issues.
So, you know the saying “You make plans and then God laughs”? Well, God is laughing really hard at that idea of mine. Yesterday, we played Jeopardy and I was convinced that I wasn’t going to come out of 8th period alive because of how aggressive a simple trivia game was going. I was terrified what would happen if I allowed them to play verb spoons where possible physical contact could happen. All I could imagine happening was a fist fight over whether or not someone had the right subject pronoun and verb pair….or a broken finger….or blood.
So, I had to pivot….and pivot fast. I quickly searched Pinterest for ideas and I saw something that caught my eye. Scattergories. My brain started churning out ideas on how I could quickly adapt this game for my students. My fingers quickly went to Canva.com where I spent less than 5 minutes creating a Scattergories card. My legs carried my weary and exhausted self down to the copier where I spent the next 20 minutes printing, unjamming, printing, adding paper, and printing some more to retrieve my 75 copies. We were ready for a fun but calm game day.
I fully anticipated this game being a dumpster fire if it was too hard for my level 1 kids. I was prepared to go down in flames for a second day and just resort to pictionary or Blooket. However, scattergories ended up being the most amazing and wonderful surprise that I could have ever expected on the second to last week of school on a day where someone pulled a fire alarm and children have truly lost their minds.
Scattergories is a family favorite classic game that involves lists of categories and a lettered die. Players have 2 minutes to think of words that fit the categories on their list. In the traditional game, there are multiple lists to choose from and everyone works with the same list. Here is how I adapted it for my class and ways I intend to play in the future!
Scattergories Prep:
First, I thought of 8 categories to give my students from topics we have studied throughout the year. There definitely were many to choose from, but the 8 I landed on were
I put these categories in a table and printed it out. See the image below for what it looked like.
In traditional Scattergories the players typically change lists each time they play a new round or they get a new paper. I wanted to minimize paper use so that is why I formatted it the way I did.
I used a letter generator and told my students that they had 2 minutes to come up with as many words as they could that started with that letter that fit in each category.
When the timer went off, students shared out their words and I wrote them on the board for everyone to see.
We played several rounds of this and kids kept adding the new words for new letters onto their same paper because I really wanted to minimize paper.
I wanted them to see the entire list of words for each category at the end. So many of my students were really excited to see how many words they were able to come up with.
What would I do differently? Honestly….not much! I would have students use notebook paper and project the categories on the board and change some out as we played. Students even thought of categories that I didn’t think of that I want to use!
I was SHOCKED that even my students who are the hardest to engage were really into this game. I was shocked at what words they remembered. I was shocked at what words they clearly learned from FVR. I was shocked that they asked me to keep playing.
I hope everyone has an uneventful rest of the school year and that Scattergories can possibly save your sanity like it did mine!
