End-of-Semester Time Fillers for your English Classroom, part 1
In my experience, the semester ends in one of two ways: in a mad rush to finish a unit before time runs out, or bewildered by how I managed to get a unit taught, assessed, graded and returned before the last day of the semester. I resist the idea of a third option—I can count on one hand the number of times when I felt like I had exactly the right amount of time left before we took our winter break.
So what do you do with students when you’re done with Unit A and you don’t want to start Unit B until you’re back from your school’s break? Here are some ideas:
TED-Ed videos are created with the intention of being shared in classrooms, which makes them significantly more trustworthy than your average YouTube video. On the TED-Ed website, you can create lessons of your own using any video (TED-Ed or otherwise), but we like the “Discover” feature.
Discover (drop down menu from the red toolbar) lets you browse lessons and are easy to sort by subject and age-level. Each lesson has a video, a “Think” section with questions (multiple-choice, free response), “Dig Deeper” with additional resources for students to explore, and a “Discuss” section where students can respond on the website to a guided discussion question, or could use the prompt for an in-class discussion or writing activity. Teachers can also customize lessons by changing questions, adding questions, editing and/or swapping out the “Dig Deeper” material, and adding or changing the prompt in the “Discuss” section.
Here are two lessons we enjoyed: Why are we so attached to our things? - Christian Jarrett and Who decides what’s in the dictionary? - Ilan Stavans.
Play Exquisite Corpse
Students are going to be sold on the name alone, and once they get the hang of the activity, you won’t have to do much but supervise. Exquisite Corpse poems are written by having one person write a word on a piece of paper, folding the paper to conceal the word, and passing the paper to the next person. This explanation from Poets.org outlines all of the rules. Based on our experience, we have some other tips and tricks for keeping everything running smoothly:
Following Poets.org’s advice for the structure of each sentence: adjective, noun, verb, adjective, noun
Have students brainstorm big lists of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, reminding them to choose interesting words over boring ones. Poems with words like cheddar, twist, and moldy will produce more interesting poems than cheese, walk, and old. If they really struggle, this random word generator can be useful.
Use scratch paper or paper from the recycle bin for students to use. Cut papers into three or four vertical strips to get the most use out of each piece of paper.
Rotate papers at the same time as a class or have students pre-fold and pre-number the paper they’re writing on so that they know when they’ve created four-five lines’ worth of poetry.
Pick a theme for each poem so that the words students choose have a chance of creating ideas that connect. For example: school, celebrations, competitions, etc.
Have one group give you the five words from their first line of poetry and show them different ways of cleaning up the language. For example: warlike editor limit thankful menu (yes, we used the random word generator): The warlike editor limited the thankful menu, or: a warlike editor limits thankful menus.
The poems aren’t going to make perfect sense. But they’ll be fun to create, edit, and share and it gives you a chance to sneak in some instruction on a pretty esoteric corner of the literature world.