Week 12 Reflection

This week I tried another review game in class. This time I was prepared.
Two days ago we started a unit on prehistoric cultures-the cultures that settled in West Virginia before the the Europeans settled there. We had spent two days on the four types of cultures-Paleo, Archaic, early and late Woodland cultures discussing about their culture, similarities between the groups, differences, and improvements in technology between them.
For gameday, I desgined the class to have the first ten to fifteen minutes being spent on discussing the late Woodland culture. After we finished discussing them I then broke them up into groups and got things going. They created team names, talked about the rules of the game, and began the game.
The game was similar to jeopardy-I asked them a question and the first group to raise their hand got a chance to answer the question correctly. If they answered it right, they had the opportunity to shoot a hoop for additional points. At the end of the game we tallied up the points and the winner was announced.
Amazing to me was how much better it went because I planned other activities before playing the game to make sure the game didn't last to long. In some of my classes I wasn't able to ask all my questions due to time constraints. I was much happier with not finishing at the end of class rather than finishing and doing the same thing over and over.
Planning for this made things much smoother and less stressful for me. Such an easy thing as alotting fifteen minutes to go over other things made the game playing much better. Amazing how one thing can totally change the appearance and opinion of a certain activity.