Kahoot Fun, without One to One!

Y’all I am more obsessed with Kahoot than my kids… for real… and they have a real obsession. They ask for it every day…. I haven’t even shown them Quizlet Live! or Textivate Competitive Mode yet…. So much fun to come!

I have a class set of chrome books in my classroom. I am VERY fortunate. I don’t however, choose to use these with my 3rd or 4th graders. This is a personal decision, that I make for many reasons but the number one reason being that I simply don’t have enough time for these kiddos to each get a chrome book, get logged on, get to the website, type in a code, type in a name or name and password and get started… Establishing that routine takes time and patience and time is SO precious when I see them so little.

My 3rd and 4th graders love Kahoot just as much as my fifth graders though! They also ask for it daily. If you saw me in my learning labs at iFLT this year or in Vermont at Express Fluency, you saw how I use  Kahoot without technology. It is SUPER easy… All you need is red, yellow, green, and blue card stock, and if you don’t have that then all you need is white paper and some markers (that is what I did in Vermont).

Earlier this year I cut 30 sets of small squares (slightly bigger than the size of a post-it) in each color so that I would have enough for each student in my classes to have their own set of red, blue, green and yellow papers. For those of you who haven’t played Kahoot yet, ODM you MUST. Here is an example of Kahoot in the traditional “Quiz” format. My students did this “assessment” after learning about Maddie Rae. I love it because I can quickly gauge who: 1. understood the Spanish I was speaking 2. is reading for themselves. It is a powerful formative assessment tool, they know it but they don’t care… they LOVE it….. The same is true for when we play with papers instead of technology.

I let my students play with the papers in their laps, or on their chairs, or with them laid out in front of them on the floor. They read the question and the possible answers and they hold up their answer in the air as fast as they can. In typical “Maestra” fashion, I pretend I am TOTALLY keeping track of points and award random individual points (always positive and never negative) all the time for:

• getting quiet fast for the next question
• for putting up the correct answer quickly
• for not looking at their friends and reading the TV and taking time to answer correctly for themselves
• for QUIET celebrations when they’re correct (which is SO hard because it is SO intense and SOOOO exciting) (especially with the music)
• and for hard work and determination if they persist after getting a question incorrect

When I give these “points” I make sure and name WHY I am giving points and who is receiving them because then I always see MORE of that desired behavior! Do I actually have a way to keep track of these “random” points for each student when they’re holding up papers and not inputing their answers in a computer? NO… absolutely not. Does saying I do motivate them and hold them accountable? Absolutely yes…. I don’t even need a clip board… I swear my little scholars think I am a math genius or something. If I taught 7th grade or higher I would keep a clipboard in front of me and pretend to tally these points… just remember the power of the white lie and truly observe who in your class is reading and comprehending. It is an amazing assessment tool.

So …. Maestra…. why today!? Why did you decide to write about this now?! WELLLLLLL…. today, I tried the JUMBLE feature that Kahoot has! I tried it for the first time with my 3rd grade classes. It was all by accident though… Last night I was desperately searching for a pre-made Kahoot for the video “the Present”.  (Because YES, you can search for previously made Kahoots and use them as is or edit them to fit YOUR needs… WHAT??!?!! Best ever… I know) I have been working for the last week and a half with this movie doing various activities after having watched and paused it the whole way through over 2-3 days. I found a Kahoot and made a “copy” and changed some of the language in it to make it more comprehensible to my novices and then realized it looked SERIOUSLY different to what I was used to. Since when you play with paper, YOU the teacher still have to log on with the game pin using your phone, I decided to give it a try and I FELL IN LOVE…. Jumble allows me to type in CHUNKS of a sentence, and the kids then put those chunks in a comprehensible order using ALL of their papers instead of holding up ONE! I set the timer for my 3rd graders to 60 seconds and y’all they LOVED this… Here is the example with JUMBLE that I did today,  and here is a video of la clase de Ecuador playing! This is the class that I posted 3 full class videos of last week…

ANYWHO… I highly recommend you use this tool whether you are one to one or sans tech. Kids will love it, and you’ll have some real formative data to show what it is they know and understand! Today was awesome because a lot of my littles recognized explicitly for the first time, that adjectives come AFTER nouns most of the time in Spanish. YAY!

SO proud, so excited and SO jazzed to share!

Until next time,

Happy Monday, Happy Teaching and Happy 2nd to last week before break (hopefully for most of you reading this!)

LOVE,

La Maestra Loca