The Votes Are In - High School Students Love Playing with Play Dough!
Artifact Justification
This activity, along with the student feedback I received at the end of my student teaching, perfectly emulates my deep understanding of Learner Development and mastery of this standard. By combining the social drive of adolescents with the multiple means of engagement provided through the game, this spin-off of Cranium is a class favorite that provides insightful peer-to-peer teaching and includes all learners in expanding their understanding of a given topic.
I developed this game as a way to help students conceptualize complex and layered ideas. This activity was successful at doing that while also providing the surprising bonuses of offering strong language support for ELL students, allowing for a quick formative assessment of the group and giving an opportunity to misspell misconceptions that pop up.
Magic of Modeling
The most popular group game amongst my 11th grade US History students was far and above this adaptation of the board game Cranium that involved using play dough to model out concepts and events.
Why it Works:
It is incredibly social, high energy and slightly competitive.
The act of modeling the dough engages the tactile sensory system,
allowing for multiple means of engagement with the content
Students share their thinking out loud AND through visuals
Students get to hear the explanations and understandings of their peers
A helpful way to assess the general level of understanding of the class
Here is how the activity progresses:
Pass out playing cards randomly to create your groups and have students relocate.
Each group is given a whiteboard, markers and some play dough (I had our homemade by one of the cooking classes).
A slide is displayed on the board with the event, word or concept that you want students to model. Generally, I start with a semi-low-hanging vocabulary word so they can begin quickly on the first round and get into the game. You can also include a rubric, which comes in handy when you need to quickly assess the products on the fly.
I use Canva for my slides and use the timer function (just hit the number on your keyboard and it pops up) so students can see how much time there is for the round .
Students deliberate in their groups over how to best represent whatever is written on the slide, then delegate out modeling or labeling tasks and prepare something to present.
I will float the room to check in with the various groups, see what they are thinking and generally check for understanding. I make note of which groups are not quite grasping it and which are.
Then groups will nominate a presenter who comes to the front and explains their model to the class. This is where a lot of magic happens for the groups who weren't quite getting it before, they see how their peers explain it, hear it explained in various ways and it helps A LOT!
Finally I will give each group a score from 0-4 (this worked especially well in my placement school because the students were used to Mastery Based grading) and declare a winner for the round. The small amount of competition fuels engagement, but because there are many rounds all groups have lots of chances to win.
Examples of Student Work:
The two side photos show student representations of a market economy. What is interesting to note is that students had previously watched a video explaining market economies, which used a lemonade stand as an example. The student group on the left focused on the dynamics between demand and cost of goods, whereas the group on the right remembered the analogy of the producer and the consumer. Both are important understandings and because of the presenting piece, everyone in the class got to experience both parts.
The middle image shows a group's model of a trust. In our unit on the Gilded Age, students were tasked with researching and reporting on modern cases utilizing Anti-trust laws, the foundation of which was an understanding of what a trust even is. This activity acted as a very effective formative assessment because I could see where gaps were, around what and who had them.
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