[little sage]

This week I'm reviewing the last half of the textbooks with my elementary kids and I needed to cover a lot of material that they hadn't seen in a while. Of course they get antsy until I throw out the word "game", so this is what I did. I think it worked fairly well.

1) divided kids into pairs, matching stronger and weaker students
2) got out my box of coloured paper squares which I use for bingo chips
3) piled a stack of scrap paper from the recycling bin on each of their tables
4) asked a review question from the book
5) students worked in pairs to write their answers on the scrap paper
6) after a 5-4-3-2-1 countdown, students held up their papers
7) all correct answers got a point (a coloured paper square)
8) bonus point for all perfectly spelled and punctuated answers
9) alternated between which student of the pair wrote the answer
10) counted points at the end of class, gave reward to the pair with the most paper squares.

I would also suggest taking points away for using a language other than English. I think they had fun and didn't realize they were studying. One glitch is that the writing really slows the game down, so we didn't cover quite as much as I would have liked.

If anyone has any other activities for large-scale reviews, please let me know. I'd like some altenatives for when I get bored of this one.