My Favorite Review Activity

Alright, last post for the year.  I've been much less active here and on Twitter lately after kind of just going all in last year.  Nevertheless, I still have things I want to share and reflect on, so this post is about an activity that I have used several times now as review before a quiz.

Okay, so here it is.  Currently my favorite review activity is a cross between this 1-100 Grid I first heard about on Twitter from Julie Morgan (@fractionfanatic) and this Ghosts in the Graveyard activity from Sarah Carter (@mathequalslove).  The idea behind the 1-100 Grid is that for every question students (or pairs) answer correctly, they choose a number on a hundreds chart.  Once a number is claimed, no other students can pick that number.  At the end of the activity, I use a random number generator to select a winning number from 1 to 100.  The more questions students answer correctly, the more numbers they get to pick on the hundreds chart increasing their chances of winning.

A chart typically looks like this by the end of a class period.

One thing Julie points out in her post about the game is that it works well for smaller classes as it can get quite hectic.  TRUTH!  My classes are slightly smaller this year, but still, it can be challenging with 25+ students in class.  Here are the ways I altered this activity to work with my classes of up to 30 students.

1. I used the idea of challenge cards from Sarah's Ghosts in the Graveyard activity.  Instead of letting students pick a number for every single question they answered correctly, they chose a challenge card with 3-5 questions that all had to be answered correctly before they could pick a number.
2. I set up an answer checking station.  Once the activity started, I sat at this station and DID NOT GET UP FOR ANY REASON (except the time there was a fire drill of course).  If students needed help, they had to come see me.  If they needed an answer checked, they had to come see me.  If they needed the hundreds chart to pick a number, they had to come see me.  If they needed a new challenge card, they had to come see me.  The first time I ran this activity this year, I forgot that this was how I had done it last year.  So instead of staying in one place and having students come to me, I was flying around the room trying to check answers, help students, and pass around the hundreds chart all at once.  It was pure chaos on my part (although students still seemed to be working just fine).
3. I only let students work on one challenge card at a time - there is no hoarding challenge cards.  In order to get a new challenge card, they had to get their old card checked by me.  Because I was not circling the room as they were working, I still needed a way to check their progress and be sure they weren't practicing something entirely wrong for the whole class period.  This also helped me in the preparation stage because I only needed to have a handful of copies of each challenge card since students could work on challenges in any order.
4. I gave students a recording sheet.  It's mostly a blank piece of paper for them to show their work and answer the challenge questions, but it also had space for me to sign off on which challenges they had completed.  The very first time I ran this activity, students kept asking me which challenges they had already done when they were picking a new card.  It was a nightmare for me to try to keep track on an attendance sheet (once students start getting answers checked, this gets very fast-paced and students really do race to complete as many challenges as they can).  Having this designated recording sheet also gave students something to hand in at the end of class - do your students also feel like they always have to pass something in?

I allow students to work in pairs or individually when I do this activity, but I definitely encourage pairs so that they have someone to go to if they get stuck.  I remind them that if they have to come to me for help, they may be waiting in a line of people getting their answers checked.

Every time I do this activity, I am amazed by how much practice my students are able to get in one class period.  Even students who are typically less engaged in class rush to complete as many challenges as they can!  In fact, the last time we did this activity, I had only planned on doing it for half the class and then taking a quiz the second half of class.  But students were so engaged and working so hard to finish every challenge before the quiz, that I decided to let them keep working all class period.  You could tell every time they came up to get their answers checked that they were more confident with the material and for some students, they were getting more practice in that class period than they previously had during the unit.

I've used this activity to review rational numbers, properties of exponents, and rate of change & functions, and at some point I may share my files with the challenge questions and recording sheet, but for now, it's New Year's Eve!