Scoot On Over!

Well, I do not want to be that teacher.  Ever.  I want to be just the opposite: willing to learn and take risks, trying new games and strategies, fun, exciting, and yes, even unpredictable.  I fear I will not be these things, though, if I choose to always take an easy route.  This is why in the past month, I have attempted several new things, and with pretty good amounts of success, I must say.

Anchor charts and task card sets have both been welcome changes in my classroom.  Anchor charts I will save for another entry here, but I do have a few pictures from a previous post that kind of give you the idea.

4 Task Cards from my set of Graphing Points on a Coordinate Plane

Task card sets are just what they sound like: a set of cards with topic-centered tasks printed on them.  I decided to have a go at it and created 3 sets for starters.  I also included posters with examples of the topic and corresponding Common Core Standards and “I Can” Statement Posters for reference.  The posters are perfect for pasting into student math journals for their own reference—all I had to do was reduce their size and copy.

Originally, my thought was to use the task cards in either a math center or as independent work.  Then, I stumbled, with great fortune, upon Teaching With a Mountain View’s blog.In this great blog entry, she gives a great description, step by step, on how to use task cards to play a classroom game of Scoot.  Totally new to me, but pretty fun-sounding, so I just had to try it!  Fast forward to today….it worked, it was fun, and ALL students were quietly engaged and furiously working.  If that isn’t success, I don’t know what is!Using Mountain View’s advice and steps, here is what I did:

4.  At first, I gave students a longer period of time to solve each problem, to help them gain confidence.  As the game went on, I gave shorter amounts of time to solve problems before I called out “Scoot!”  Every student was fully engaged.    Once students were back to their original seat and starting card, the game was over.

5.  At this point, the teacher has several options.  She can collect all the answer sheets and check them as a type of formative assessment, have students each self-check and then redo the cards they missed, or put the answer key on the Smartboard (if you are lucky enough to have one…) and check together.  I chose this last option.  As students checked their answers, I was able to walk around and observe which questions were most often missed.  We then took some time to look at these questions together and revisit concepts.

6.  Reward the winner(s)!  We had a 4-way tie for first place, so these winners got a round of applause and a sticker for their treasure charts.  Hooray!

Since everyone loved this game, and I felt students were truly engaged in learning and demonstrating mastery of a skill, we will surely use it again.  How many of you out there “Scoot”?