Fun Fridays!

posted Jul 26, 2013, 1:22 PM by Kathryn Behling [ updated Jul 30, 2013, 6:25 AM ]

9th graders are a special breed of high schooler. Their brains are still in middle school, but their bodies are in my high school classroom.

My first and second years teaching, I found myself with year long Algebra 1 classes. That means I saw the students for 90 minutes a day, 5 days a week, all year long. This can be rough!

About halfway through the year, I realized that I had to do something to give my students a break at the end of the week while they were still learning. This is where Fun Fridays came from.

The Setup:

I put my students in groups of 4 with one strong, two weak, and three middle level students.
They spend 12 minutes per station for 5 stations.
One station is always an application station.
Each group only has 3 cards that they can use to ask the teacher a question - they must rely on each other!
At the end of the rotation, the students turn in their papers for a homework grade.
Each student then takes a short quiz. All of the questions come from the their stations. I have 4 levels of quizzes that go to the 4 different levels of students.
The student's quiz grade is 1/2 their own grade and 1/2 their group average.
The students always have a writing homework assignment.

The Fun Fridays activity I am uploading for you today is one I did towards the end of the year consisting of a lot of review. Enjoy!