creating engaging classrooms

 My PE colleagues are constantly griping at how student fitness is way down, especially since COVID, so here's a fun activity to help your students boost their cardio!  This is an old one (I got it from the legendary Gerard McLoughin at IH Barcelona) and it's great for waking your students up.  Put students into pairs (maybe threes, but big teams don't really work). Around the room (or at the end of the corridor, or outside) put up small pieces of key information you need the students to know. One partner runs to the first, memorises it, runs back, dictates it. Then they switch roles, like a relay. Spacing out the information avoids queues and crashes. Not only is this great for cardio, but you are helping students build their memorization and recall skills, both crucial for exam success (not that I'm a fan of exams as a form of assessment, but they are the reality of much of the educational landscape). More immediately, exercise creates endorphins, which is a massive m...

 I love finding ways to get games into the classroom (if you've read any of my other posts, you may have noticed). It is a great way to immediately amp up the students' engagement and energy levels. Many of the others I've written about - beep, bingo, taboo - can work in any subject. This one, I'm afraid, is purely for those Literature teachers among us... Jenga is a tense game. Therefore, I use it as a metaphor for tension in a text. I literally get the students to play Jenga as we read a tense moment of a text. Favourite moments for this include: Romeo & Juliet Act 3 Scene 5; the bit with Candy's dog in Of Mice and Men ; and when Fi gatecrashes the wedding in KE Salisbury's the face that pins you . As I'm reading I call people up to take a turn. The other students will get massively distracted, but at this point you pause (maybe while a student has half pulled out a brick) and ask the students if they are enjoying the lesson. "Yes!" they ...