Fishbowl... or the poor teacher's "Catch Phrase"

Each day my homebase (or homeroom) has activity block. Activity block is from 11:05-12:55, which is almost 2 hours (yes, you read right). During this time, we have Channel One news, our student TV show, lunch (there's one hour), plus time for advisor/advisee activities and everyone's favorite, study hall/silent reading.

I came across this game the other day, and found it was too good to keep to myself. As a 7th grade teacher, if the kids ask to play the game again, it must be a winner!

Fishbowl:

1. Give each student 3 cards/slips of paper and instruct them to write 1 word on each paper. You can modify this for whatever you wish. My suggestion is that you use nouns as they are the easiest to describe. They should not use proper names!

2. Once they write down their 3 words - they can fold the papers and put them into a basket/container/fishbowl.

Now that you have words, you have options:

Catch Phrase - Object is to describe the word, but not say it. Set a timer for a minute. One person chooses the card and describes the word without saying it so his/her team can guess. Example, "Kentucky Fried..." "Chicken." After a minute, change teams and award 1 point per correctly identified word.

Guesstures - Object is to describe/act out the word, but not say it. In the game, the "actor" chooses 4 words to act out. That person has 1 minute to act out and/or describe all 4 words. In the game, the words disappear without warning. To add this element in, you could have a student or teacher remove 1 word every 15 seconds.

My homebase of 20 had a lot of fun with this activity! It was the perfect 25 minute activity before Channel One news. Best of all, they've asked to play it another day.

Making observations!

The blog drought is OVER! It's time to get back into the groove with a new school year and new adventures!

I really have mixed feelings about the beginning of the year. I love the newness (supplies, clothes, teachers), but I dislike the constant reminders about procedures. Spending a class period reviewing when to sharpen pencils, etc is not my idea of fun! However, it's necessary work. The more we prepare, practice, and reinforce those procedures at the beginning, the more fun my year will be in April!

As a science teacher, I really work hard to get my students to make good observations. Saying that an object is brown, isn't really good enough in my opinion. As a 7th grader, more developed observations should be made. So as a result, I've spent a lot of time going over what a good observation looks like and what a "not-so-good" observation looks like.

As a fun way to observe living things, and to escape the hot/humid classroom, we trekked outside to observe the natural environment around the school. I had my students take their composition notebooks outside (no need for clipboards with those things) and they had to be in my sight and at least an arm's length away from another person. In the future, it will definitely be more like 2 or 3 arm's lengths - I don't know how middle schoolers find each other, but they are like magnets. We made observations on a beautiful August day for about 40 minutes which was a perfect way to break up the block time!