It’s the first day of religious school and you’ve put alot of effort into classroom displays. Do the students ooh and aah over your creativity? Do they eagerly examine every sign, flash card, and poster you’ve so carefully placed? No way! They’re busy meeting and greeting their classmates and comparing ipods or smart phones or whatever neat gadgets they have crammed into their backpacks.
Try this! Once you’ve welcomed your students, taken attendance, and, perhaps, recited the Bracha for Torah study, it’s time for a classroom scavenger hunt based on your terrific (and informative) displays. Students can participate individually or, as a team-builder, they can work in groups of 2 or 3. I let them “hunt” in table groups, so that they get acquainted with classmates they’ve been assigned to sit with. Each student receives a sheet with statements to be completed. The statements refer to some element of the displays. In order to complete the statements, students must look closely at wall, door, bulletin board, and project display board displays. The first group to correctly complete all the statements wins a prize (lollypops, for example). While each student has a sheet, the group as a whole need only produce one correctly completed sheet to win.
To make the scavenger hunt even more challenging, you might require students to hunt silently – using only gestures to lead members of the group to answers in the displays.
Here are some examples of statements that I’ve used in classroom scavenger hunts:
-Penguins live way down south in (Hebrew)_________________ (The correct fill-in is found on a Hebrew language map of the world and I’ve noted in the statement that the missing item is to be written in Hebrew.)
-The Hebrew letter dalet looked like this____________ in classical Greek script. (The fill-in comes from a chart showing how several alphabets evolved.)
-The second Parsha in the First Book of the Torah is___________________ (The fill-in comes from a poster showing the Parshot in each Book of the Torah.)
The amount of time you plan for the scavenger hunt will determine the number of statements to include. I plan to include 15 statements which should take 10-15 minutes to complete. I tell the students that they have a ten minute time limit.
If no group has completed the sheet in the time allotted, the group with the highest number of correctly filled-in statements wins. Ta Da! Now the stage is set for learning from displays.
Once a group has won, we all have a snack and turn our attention to the lesson, where references will be made to the displays that students have just examined.
There is a variation on the scavenger hunt game which involves searching for “treasures” hidden among the displays. More about this in future posts.
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