As a teacher, you know the best way to review for a test is with a game. But as teachers, we also secretly, (or perhaps not so secretly!) worry about the principal walking into our class at the very moment that the whole class is playing games! Well, it’s NOW time to let go of the guilt and worry about playing review games with your class!
For my own students, I’ve created & used this set of Social Studies Review games successfully in many ways and for a variety of reasons. First, it’s designed to be both teacher and student-friendly! For teachers, all of the Review Games in my TPT store have multiple applications, for example, their primary use is as a review game, as the name indicates, but here are some other reasons why teachers love these Review Games:
· they can be used to create bulletin boards
· they can be used for Word Walls
· they can be used for Writing Prompts
· they can be used to check for understanding/mid-point assessments
· they can be easily modified to accommodate for the needs of ELL and Special Ed students
Because the review games have several different activities and skills within each set, they also are a perfect resource for providing academic rigor. Each review game set touches on all levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy by having the following components:
1. Act it out – appealing to kinesthetic learners, students act out an era or scene from history
2. Free-form mapping – students are given a topic and draw out pictures related to the facts they know on that topic, and respond to other finished maps as well
3. Triple Venn Diagram – students must assess similarities and differences in the 3 topic cards they are given
4. Category Card sets – students must categorize the cards given and then describe the traits of each set they come up with
5. Even more activities are included in the sets, based on the game & time period!
I have several of these sets of review games in my TPT store, I hope you will take a look at them as I know you’ll find them as useful and engaging as my students and I do!
So, while students are engaged in a lively learning game, they’re also challenged in the areas of recall, categorizing, describing, understanding, applying knowledge, and finally, creating a finished product from synthesizing knowledge! Bloom would definitely approve of any game that does all of this, and so would your principal!
