S2: E7 - NO prep strategies! YAY!

Get ready, in this episode, I'm giving you three, no-prep strategies to use in your classes for when you come into school and literally, barely have the energy to teach. No prep, like zero prep! Get excited, and listen now!

Links & Resources

The Comprehensible Classroom
Collaborative Free-Writes
S2 Episode 6: The POWER of Dopamine! with Jess Psaros
S1 Episode 4: 3 Low to NO prep Games for the World Language Classroom!

Let's connect!

My Blog
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Transcript

Welcome!

Welcome back to my podcast teaching la vida loca for season two. I'm Annabelle, your Maestro Loca, and I am ready to kick off season two with even more enthusiasm, magic, and tips and tricks for your classroom. Get set for a ride of inspiration, unapologetic authenticity, and ideas to spark more joy in your teaching journey. I'm turning up the excitement and elated to have you right here with me. I'm not just your host, I'm your cheerleader, and I am thrilled you're tuning in, buckle up, and let's do this. Let's tackle teaching la vida loca together. Hi, welcome to episode seven of teaching la vida loca. I am so happy you are here. I am excited about this episode, because I want to give you three, no-prep strategies. No prep, like zero prep, like you come into school and you're like, oh, my God, what am I going to do today. Because you know, you don't want to be there, or you literally, barely have the energy to push yourself out of bed. Because that's been my life lately. I am 34 weeks pregnant. And these no-prep strategies have been my go-to. I have lots and lots of them. But I want to share three with you today. I'm really excited. So, buckle up. Let's do this. 

First No-Prep Activity

So, the first is called Gimkit collab. I've shared this over the last year and a half at workshops that I've attended in person with people at conferences. And it's one of those that every time I share it, people are like, oh yeah, I do Gimkit, but they don't know about Gimkit collab. It's always like one or two people in the room that actually know about the collab part. So don't skip this part of the podcast. Don't assume that you know what I'm talking about. Gimkit collab is where the students are creating the Gimkit for you. Not the level, they're just creating the questions. This is really powerful, especially because it shows you what it is that they took away from your mini unit from the story, from the lesson you did the day before, from whatever you're currently working on maybe a novel you're reading in class, it tells you what they know, it tells you what they've been paying attention to. Because they're basing the questions off of what they're most familiar with, right. So, what I do with a Gimkit collab, if you go into Gimkit, and you click create new, you know, like make a new kit. If you look to the left, you're going to see something that says, Create with kit collab. And when you click on that, it allows you to unlock kit collab, and it'll give you a link that you can share within Google Classroom. Last year, when I didn't have a Google classroom with my third graders, I would create a tiny URL link that they could type in because the Gimkit Link was too long. Like you just plop that link somewhere where the kids can grab it. I think, now it comes with a QR code. So, if you're a teacher that has cell phones in the classroom and likes using them, there are some of you, I know that you can just have kids open with the QR code. And then they type in their name, and they start making questions.

Important Part of the Process

Here's the most important part in my teacher mind, and you can take it or leave it but I hope that you take it because you're listening to this podcast so we must vibe on some level. I then stop sharing screen. I don't want my students seeing what questions are being submitted for many reasons. The biggest is the questions that my students are submitting to me, 90% of them have errors in them. I'm accepting those questions, and then going in and editing them. So, while my students are working hard to submit questions, I'm also busting my butt to quickly accept their question which they get really excited. It's so sweet. Like, “you accepted my question. Thanks, maestra”. I'm also simultaneously shouting out like, “oh, I love that you used one of our transition words to make that a longer question”. Or “I loved that you used the transition word first in your question”, and I shout out their name, just to push all students to do more. Right? So, I accept the question and then once you accept a question, you can go back into the main kit and hit edit. You can edit any of the questions just like you would edit a question of yours. I also do this to make sure that they have all the correct answers chosen because sometimes they might enter four answers, possible answers, but not select all the ones that are correct. For example, last week, what are the books we're reading? I'm reading three different class novels right now. And my fifth graders are reading O Chico Global by Leslie Davison. And one of them wrote something that needed editing, so I accepted it, but I went in and added what was needed. And then I went in and edited their answers, because they wrote five is one of the possible answers, three, two, and six. But they only had five selected. Now, if the kids are counting Singapore, where he just moved to? It's technically six countries. So, I added six as a possible correct answer, and five, because five is technically true in chapter one. So, you can edit what questions are right, or you can add a question mark at the beginning of the sentence. You can add accent marks because my kids have Chromebooks. The accent marks aren't as easy even though Gimkit has a little mini keyboard you can pull up. Accent marks are another thing that I'm constantly adding. And then at the end of class, we get to play it. And we play from any anywhere from four minutes to 10 minutes, depending on how many questions my students submitted.

Scaffolded

The other nice thing about this is it's automatically scaffolded. There are students who have come throughout the year, mid-year, this year, when they are writing questions for me, they're writing it in English, I'm translating it into Spanish. That's one scaffold. Another thing that's really beautiful is the kids think that I have a mark for everybody. I don't. But I tell them I do. Everybody based on their level of acquisition and their level of proficiency have a different number of questions they have to write. It could be anywhere from four to 15 questions. And they're like, “well, how many are mine?”, I'm like, “I can't remember. I just put it in, it'll show up. Your name will show up blue when you've submitted enough”. And I just go with that. And I pretend like “okay, everybody's name, almost everybody's name has turned blue. Almost everybody has submitted enough questions, submit one or two more to make sure that you have that many done”. And you know, I'm just making it up to make sure that everybody is using the whole time. But some of my novice, more novice students, it takes a lot of time to think about writing a question and writing answers. And I have other students who can pump out, you know, a question every 90 seconds. At the end, they're like, “wait, you haven't accepted my question?” Because there's so many you can't keep up. Just say “Oh, I mass selected all of them. At the end, they'll all be uploaded in the next 10 minutes”. That's a lie. The next time I go into this kit, it's going to show me 86 unapproved questions, I can add them if I want to. I can reject them if I want to. If you hit reject, though, the student will see it as rejected. I rarely, rarely, rarely ever hit reject unless it's a question that's totally off topic. For example, I tell my students there should be nobody not using capital letters on names anymore. We are in fourth and fifth grade. So, I'll reject those. My cat is going crazy. But, outside of that, I really don't like to reject because I don't want to raise the affective filter by saying “oh no, I don't like your question”. If that makes sense. You can also use this on a day if you are being observed and admin walks in one day and you had planned for it to be a super chill computer day with review or something like that. You can switch modes and switch gears quickly to Gamkit collab, and then that feels a little bit better, and admin absolutely love it because students are creating their own assessment. So that's just another idea.

No-Prep Strategy #2

The next no-prep strategy I want to share with you is the unfair game, and I learned this from a blog post from The Comprehensible Classroom blog, which is Martina Bex's blog, and she got this idea from Julia Ullman. And it's so fun. It's called the unfair game. What you do is, to make it as literally zero prep, when you come into class, you have the kids, or you, write numbers on note cards or sticky notes or popsicle sticks, something like that. When I say numbers, it could be like one 100, 200, 300, 36, 29, like literally any number, and then you decide if that number is negative or positive. I like having students do this because it literally makes it zero prep. I also have slides ready for the unfair game when I want to play them. But if I'm giving you zero prep, then I'm telling you, you don't even need to have these slides ready, you could literally have kids walk in and write numbers on sticky notes. And then just make sure you shuffle them up. All the colors of note cards, or sticky notes or popsicle sticks that you use should be the same, because you don't want kids being able to identify the points that they wrote. And then you pass out more note cards or sticky notes for kids to write questions on. So just like Gimkit collab, your students are creating the questions for you because you want something that's literally zero prep for yourself, right? If you know that you can create the questions on the spot without having students create them. That's great, too. You could just jump straight into gameplay and create the questions off the top of your head based on what you've been doing lately. It might be you did a student interview yesterday, maybe you did a special person interview. Maybe the day before you finished doing a clip chat and you want to ask questions about that. Maybe the day before you learned about something that enhanced a mini unit you're doing, and it was cultural. Maybe you want to ask questions about that. Whatever you want to ask questions on, that's fine.

Playing Unfair

You split the class into teams, my bigger classes, I create three teams, my smaller classes, I create two different teams. And you ask the question, the first hand up gets to answer it. Now, you can do first hand up, or you can also play with whiteboards. I played with whiteboards two weeks ago. I just had kids pull them out. It's a student job. It was zero prep for me because those students know where the whiteboards are. They grab the whiteboards, they grab the markers, they pass them all out. So, every child had to answer the question that I was asking. And I called on the team or I gave the points to the team that had the most kids answer the question correctly on time. I rotate so that you always want everybody to always have investment in the game. If you want to learn more about that and why that's so important for dopamine, for class investment, for class community, then listen to my last episode, Episode Six with Jessica. I'm not going to go into that right now. But you want to make sure that everybody always feels like they're in the game, point wise. So, let's say Team Three, Team Guatemala, is the one that everybody puts the answers on their boards correctly. I see teamwork happening. I see positive, good sportsmanship happening. I'll say okay, Guatemala, you get the points. Do you want to keep the points? Or do you want to give the points. Now, I haven't told them how many points they get. It could be that the card that's going to be pulled is negative 200 points. So, they have to decide in advance of knowing how many points are on the card that I'm going to choose. They have to decide if they're keeping them or giving the points away. If they're giving the points away, they have to decide which team they're giving the points to. And then the card is chosen, and it is flipped. And you can imagine the reactions, it's hysterical. It's one of my favorite, favorite games. 

When Students Can’t Handle It

I will tell you that I have a fourth-grade class that absolutely could not handle the sportsmanship with this one. And I am a teacher who, who that's what I care most about, being a good sport. And so, I shut the game down, shut it down. And we just answered the questions on paper. We did a write and discuss together because they couldn't handle the unfair game because they were so angry about how it was going. Now, that was the first time ever, and I've done this game with middle school for a million years. I've done this game. I did this game with all my other fourth and fifth grade classes and it went really well. But I did have one fourth grade class where they're so highly competitive. And they were just really ugly mean to each other. And so even though I first tried revisiting, we have a classroom norm, that is literally – “play, have fun but be a good sport” or something like that. And even me pointing out that norm and revisiting that norm, it wasn't working. So, it's just something that I wasn't going to play if I didn't like the energy it created in my classroom, and I didn't like how I felt, like it was hurting our communities. So, we shut it down.

Collaborative Free Writes

The last one I want to share with you, that's a great, no prep strategy, is a collaborative free writes. I haven't done this yet in elementary, but I used it all the time in middle school for the years that I was teaching middle school. And I first had the idea about eight years ago when I was teaching at an independent school here in New Orleans. And what I had students do was I created a one-page document with a table at the top of four squares. And the table at the top had four big squares that could be drawn in. And then under that table, were lots of lines for writing. Students came in, and I explained the process. I told them that I was going to set a four-minute timer to have them write. And I did this with my students that were not novices. They had had Spanish for a year or two years. So, you could do this with Spanish 2, 3, 4, or AP. I set the timer and started it and they wrote. They wrote about anything they wanted to, but they had to use our high frequency words That was one of the rules they had to use the whole time, and they couldn't stop writing. It could be anything, nothing was off limits. The one thing I did used to say was that you had to use your best handwriting. That was a really important thing, which is one of the reasons I haven't done it with my elementary students. As soon as the timer went off, we would get up, we would do a quick stretch or a quick brain break, they'd sit back down with their clipboard, and then they would pass it to the right. So, everybody passed their clipboard to the right. When we did this activity, I liked to sit in a giant circle. That made the passing really easy, and they would pass the clipboard to the right. Then the next person would have one minute or so to read what the previous person had written. Then they would add on to it. So, I would set another timer, and let them add. Now you could start with a longer timer at the beginning than I did. I think I actually started with more than three minutes at the beginning. I have a blog on this that I'm pretty sure I can share it in the show notes, I'll look for it. If I find it all, I'll put it in the show notes. I also have that blog of the unfair game that I'll share with you. But basically, it just keeps passing to the right. And then at any point instead of one of your brain breaks or stretching, you can have students draw the story or start to illustrate the story in the boxes above. Again, zero prep, all you have to do is have those papers and to make it literally zero prep so that you don't have to print anything, you can go Bertha Delgadillo style and make a foldable, right? You can make a foldable in class with students. Give everybody a piece of paper, tell them how you want it folded, they can fold squares at the top and then have a big section at the bottom for writing. You could have them fold the paper in half and one half of the paper is going to be writing and the other half is going to be the drawings. There's a million ways to do this with literally zero prep. Or you can just print a simple worksheet, if you want to, for them to be able to do the writing on. And then at the end, I collected them, and we read some of the best ones together if there was extra time. There was very rarely enough time in the blocks that I was teaching when I was doing this in middle school because there were 45-minute blocks and 50-minute blocks. And with those brain breaks built in, it just really didn't allow for it. But it did allow me to read them the next day and then share them the next day and extend that zero prep plan. Right? Which is awesome. It's like two for the price of one. And that's all I got for you today. Yay!

Thank You!

Thank you for joining me, thank you for being here. I hope some of these zero prep strategies help you as you go into school. Maybe today is the day, maybe today is the day that you're like, “I can't even”, and you've listened to this podcast on your way into work, and you're like jazzed about one of these ideas that you can use. Either way, save this podcast, send it to a teacher who might use it in the future, and take a second to review it on Apple podcasts. For me, every single review makes such a difference. It also really brightens my day. And I'm really, really grateful. I hope you're doing really well. And until next time, I'll be teaching la vida loca from a chair very pregnant, very tired. But doing it anyways because that's our lives right? Here we are. We're doing the work or putting in the hours we're making the donuts as my friend Darcy would say to you lots of love. Take care!