Time needed: 3 – 5 min
Why? Better than punish students for less knowledge is motivating them to get a reward for gained knowledge and a competition is the best method to combine recall of knowledge and rewarding.
When? Any time you need to call back students to concentration, and any time you want to recall already absorbed knowledge, you can use it as review as well.
How? Better than using a competition between single students is forming groups and let them compete. This method is also forcing socialization between the class mates. There are many styles of competition existing:
- Give them certain questions or tasks to answer on time. the quickest group is the winner.
- Ask the students to give connective terms to the topic, the group which could collect in a limited time the most connective words is the winner. Let the students explain their choice.
- Write a poem and read it in front of class, let the class decide which is the best poem. Use those works for a final school year event.
- Make a painting contest, and let the class mates decide which is the best painting. Hang those works in class as decoration.
- Install a monthly contest ritual, so that students know that they can win every month periodically, this is giving a lot of motivation for the learning process in general.
Any risks? There is no risk just that students wanna over-use the time, limit the time for those contests, organize those competitions correctly before and give a clear time frame, students like to make such competition games, never forget that.
