Literacy Center: Silly Synonyms Game

Literacy centers are perfect for independent study as well as cooperative learning. But it can be time consuming creating skill centers for your class. This free skill center is a sample from our Skill Center Series that features time-saving, ready-made activities for busy teachers like you!

Follow these easy steps to play this fun game that will challenge students to match similar word meanings. While playing the game, students will get plenty of practice understanding and using synonyms.

5 Reasons to Use Cloze Reading

Cloze reading is a wonderful springboard for comprehension.  When students complete a cloze passage and have the opportunity to discuss their responses, more significant growth in comprehension takes place. Students not only gain a greater understanding of the concepts introduced in the text, but they improve and expand multiple skills.  These skills are five undeniable reasons why you should use cloze reading with your students.

Teaching & Reviewing Essential Survival Signs & Symbols

We encounter special signs, symbols, and directions in every area of our lives. They provide us with information and tell us what we can and cannot do. Knowing what they mean is vital. Knowing them is even more essential for students who are trying to expand their knowledge outside the classroom into the real world. We've put together some fun, hands-on activities to help you teach and review the essential signs and symbols with your students.

Tips for Boosting Vocabulary Skills

Vocabulary instructions should be both organic and planned. Learning new words shouldn’t be a chore. Spark an interest in students to discover new words by discussing unusual words, talking about the history of words, playing word games, and most importantly read, read, read! Try these five tips, plus free downloads to help boost your students vocabulary.

Game-Winning Ideas for Teaching Through Sports

We've got a game-plan to win over your students’ attention! Dive headfirst into a sports themed lesson plan with these game-winning ideas!

Geography
Give each student a blank U.S. map <free download>. Have students use an Atlas to locate their favorite team’s home city and state. Have students mark their blank map with a star on the home city. Then each week students keep track of where their team is playing by finding the city in an atlas, and then marking their map.  Have students answer these questions based on each week’s traveling: Which direction did the team travel? How many miles did they travel from the last city they were in?  How many states did the team travel through to get where they are? How many miles from home is the team? You can even introduce time zones and weather/climate changes.

Language
Have you ever realized how many of our everyday terms and sayings come from sports? Introduce students to sports idioms like: ballpark estimate, behind the eight ball, first out of the gate, come out of left field, dive headfirst, game-plan, get the ball rolling, and many more!  Have students familiarize themselves with these by drawing a picture of the idioms, defining the idioms, and using the idioms in a sentence.

Vocabulary
Make your spelling list sports themed with words like champion, arena, compete, coarse, fitness, performance, or opponent.  Challenge students to see how many times they can find and highlight these words in a sports magazine or newspaper. Have students write a news article about their favorite team using as many of the sports-themed spelling words as possible or use these spelling activities <free download>. We also have a Sports Vocabulary activity book that is packed with over 50 pages of reproducible worksheets all about, you guessed it, sports vocabulary!

Reading
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Pick up the Sports section of your local newspaper and get your students reading about their favorite athletes and teams. When students are more interested in what they are reading, they are sure to stick with it! Try this worksheet of questions students can answer after they read <free download>. Or grab one of Remedia’s high-interest, low readability activity books that focus on sports and famous athletes (click here to view).

Math Sports and math go hand-in-hand. From simple addition to physics and geometry, no matter your students’ math level you have an opportunity to introduce a math concept through sports! We recommend using Teaching Math Through Sports - high-interest, real-world math activities, templates, and lessons featuring hockey, baseball, basketball, skateboarding, the Olympics, and more!

Game Show Games with an Educational Spin

We all love a good game show! Next time you’re looking for ways to spruce up your game-play in the classroom, try watching your favorite game show and then modify the games for your classroom. This is not a new concept; it has been done for years with shows like Jeopardy and Family Feud. And now we’ve done it with three games that are spin-offs of NBC's Hollywood Game Night classics.  

If you're not familiar with it, the show brings together two awesome components—games and celebrities. We’ve simply put an educational twist on a few of Hollywood Game Night's very simple games so that you can use them to review just about any subject in your classroom. You probably won't have the celebrity guests, but you can definitely have fun! Bonus…these games require very few materials. Each game will require you to have a writing utensil (shock!) and a timer (a watch will do just fine).

Want more reasons to start playing games in the classroom? Read this!

Off the Top of My Head Materials: Sticky-Notes, Marker, & Timer

Split the class into at least two teams. Each student will have a sticky note on his or her forehead. Each sticky note has a review word, phrase, punctuation or grammatical term, math formula, historical figure, book character, or whatever you might want to review written on it. Everyone can see what is on the sticky note, except for the person wearing the sticky note.

Have one team play at a time. Depending on how many students are in each team, assign a time limit, like 90 seconds. Each team has that much time to try and get through as many sticky notes as possible. Have team members line up. The person at the front of the line turns to face the person behind him. That person gives the guesser clues to help him figure out what the sticky note on his own forehead says. Once the guesser gets the answer, he moves to the front of the line and turns around to begin giving clues to the person who was behind him. The person who was giving clues goes to the end of the line. Each correct answer is worth one point.

Watch how this game is played on Hollywood Game Night.

The Benefits of Playing Games in the Classroom

There's a lot of game playing going on in the classroom these days, and we think that's pretty awesome! Are you among the 67% of teachers using traditional and digital games in their classrooms?

3 Fun Dictionary Games to Build Vocabulary

Build students' dictionary skills and you’ll watch their vocabulary, reading skills, and independence grow! Each week, before you hand out your spelling list, introduce students to the words with these fun dictionary activities.