4 NO-PREP Ways to Review Skills this Spring
It is the end of March…this can only mean one thing in the elementary world.
It’s time to review everything we’ve learned this year.
Whether you need to review because you have testing that you’ll be doing, or you need to review simply because your sweet kiddos have forgotten what you taught back in September, we all do some level of skill review in the Spring!
Today, I have four no-prep review games that you can play with your students to keep them engaged in skill review! The best part about these? You can play them at any point during this end-of-year season, because it requires zero prep on your part! These are also quick games that can be stopped and started at any point in the day! So, if you only have a few minutes, you can start one of these games any time!
No-Prep Game 1: Stinky Feet
I really don’t know where this game’s name came from, but I love it. Here’s how you play:
Draw a giant foot on your white board or on some chart paper. You can draw some “stinky” lines coming off the foot if you want to play into the theme of the name.
Give each student a sticky note. Ask them to write a number between 0 and 20 on the back of the sticky note in pencil. These will be the points. If your kids are old enough to handle it, you can assign some table to put + and - in front of the number they choose to write.
Each student sticks their sticky note on the foot, number side down.
Put the kids in teams and give them review questions. I am a big fan of not doing too much prep for review. I read questions write from workbooks or textbooks that we’ve used all year.
As teams answer questions correctly, they may send someone up to choose one sticky note from the foot. Whatever is written on the back of the sticky note is the points the team gets for that round! How much each question is worth is always a surprise, keeping it super fun!
If you choose to have students write + or - with the numbers, that means teams may lose points, even if they get questions correct! If your students will be sensitive about this, I don’t recommend doing it this way the first time you play. My fourth graders handled it well back in the day, but my 2nd graders need to be eased into it every year.
This type of game also works with any colored manipulative. Take all of your counting bars or unifix cubes and assign a value to each color. (Red = 3 points; Blue = 8 points, etc.).
Students close their eyes and grab one from a box or bag. The color they draw is how many points their team gets. This is even less prep time than the sticky notes!
No-Prep Game 2: Teacher, Teacher!
This is a game that I 100% made up on a whim. The kids silently work on a problem or question on white boards or in workbooks. I say “teacher, teacher, come teach us…” and pull a kid’s name out of a jar. (I always have popsicle sticks with student names on them already done, but if you don’t, just put their numbers or names on sticky notes and drop in a bucket.) The child whose name is drawn comes up to the white board and teaches the other students about how they came to that answer. This works best in math review, and the kids take themselves SO seriously. Plus, having to teach how you came up with an answer cements your understanding even further! So, they are actually growing!
No-Prep Game 3: I Spy
If we ever have a few minutes to kill at the end of a block, I start a game of I Spy. I will say “I Spy a word with an r-controlled vowel pattern.” Or “I Spy a word with a vowel team that makes the long a sound”. Students take turns raising their hand and trying to find the word. The student who find the word gets to come up next!
No-Prep Game 4: Thinking of an Equation
This is one that my students beg to do. We play it in the hallway while we wait for our specials class to start, and when we line up for lunch. A student comes to the front of the room and says “I’m thinking of an equation that has a sum (or difference) of _____.) Students try to guess the equation they may be thinking of. If the sum was 10, then someone may guess 8 + 2. The next student may guess 6 + 4. The key is to be quiet and be a good listener so you can hear the guesses that have already been made, and use process of elimination (and a lot of fact fluency) to think about what equations are left!