How To Spice Up Reviewing
Change up your review strategies to reduce testing anxiety and appeal to multiple intelligences.
By Elijah Ammen
Reviewing for assessments can honestly be worse than taking the actual test. Often middle and high schoolers aren’t familiar with good study strategies, and spend a few minutes reading over notes or skimming a study guide that you spent more time putting together than they spent studying. As teachers, we tend to make reviewing a chore, which results in testing exhaustion, because students feel like they’ve taken the test multiple times already.
Here are a few ways you can make your in-class review time more engaging and kinesthetically appealing.
Game Shows
These types of review games are ideal because they incorporate the entire class at the same time—there is no limit to the number of people you can have playing the game. Jeopardy is a great way to get your class competing and actually trying to answer the more difficult questions that are worth more than the simple questions. This is even an easy way to incorporate Bloom’s Taxonomy—you can scaffold up the questions from basic comprehension to higher-level thinking. Go to Jeopardy Labs to speed up the game-making process, or look for lessons like this that already have their own Jeopardy games in PowerPoint.
Bingo, while a bit more passive, is something you can easily do with a large class. Print Bingo is a user-friendly site that automatically randomizes copies of the cards so you don’t have to do the work.
Finally, members of your class can compete against each other in a game where they stake fake currency against each other. For every answer the group submits, they can wager a certain amount of their money. This lesson can be adapted as needed for any subject you want. Just as an aside, be sure that you know your class and that you phrase the rules in a way that sets it up as a game, not as a mock casino in your classroom.
Board Games
If you’re looking for small group rather than whole group review activities, you can use board games to review. This lesson reviews quadratic equations using a variation of Chutes and Ladders.
Better yet, have students create their own board games. Provide basic materials that your class could use as a board, tokens, dice, or cards. While it does take a little extra time to think of the format of the game, it helps build reasoning skills as students think of logical progressions in a game. They can also teach the game to other their classmates, and thus review the same material in a variety of methods.
Kinesthetic Activities
If you have a really active class, you might want something that involves more moving around. This lesson uses baseball as a review strategy—each batter has a question for a single, double, triple, or homer, and they can move around the bases that you set up in your classroom.
Another active review is taking a beach ball or volleyball and taping the review terms on them. Students toss around the ball and when you catch the ball, whatever your right thumb is on is the review term you need to define or give an example for.
Visuals
Some review strategies are useful because they allow your classes to take their games home for further review. Most of us have memories of making fortune-tellers (aka cootie-catchers) in middle school. In your class, you can take this basic origami and elevate it beyond predicting who has a crush on you. Use fortune-tellers for vocabulary review—it makes the flashcard process a little less monotonous.
If you do take the flashcard route, try having your class make cards on Quizlet. This site lets you make or find notecards for virtually every subject, and also includes online review activities to make the review process more active.
Lesson Planet Resources:
How to set up your classroom to make America's favorite pastime your class' favorite reviewing pastime.
Review quadratic equations or adapt this lesson to review other concepts using Chutes and Ladders.
Raise the stakes by giving the participants fake money to wager on their answers.
A lesson with powerpoints for history review. Use this as an example when you make your own on Jeopardy Labs.