Fun Ways to Review Academic Content
Engaging Review Strategies and Activities for Teachers and Students
Trying to recall what a student learned over an extended period of time can pose a challenge for students as well as teachers. Often, school-given resources provide boring review materials, which block student motivation to review past learning.
Both students and teachers would benefit from review strategies that are engaging and effective. Such strategies might include competitive games, critical thinking synthesis activities, or peer review tricks.
Competitive Academic Games
Review content by playing competitive academic games. Teachers might try using the academic content to create themed categories and review questions for a game of Jeopardy. They might also try playing a game of BINGO by reviewing major topics and vocabulary from a unit of study.
Winners can earn rewards such as ‘homework passes,’ extra points on a test, or teacher purchased trinkets (which can usually be reimbursed through the school district).
Teachers must be careful with the competitiveness of such games. They must be mindful to positively encourage students who did not win to continue to study and look for future chances to earn rewards. Teachers should encourage these students to take what they didn’t succeed with in the game as an agenda for personal review of the content.
Critical Thinking Activities
Teachers can also review academic content through activities that promote critical thinking as well as content synthesis. This may involve worksheets that require students to sort major topics and vocabulary into categories they must create and justify.
Teachers can use the same method without a worksheet, but rather by cutting out strips of paper with the major topics and vocabulary that students can sort on their desk and then orally justify. They can also have students develop creative writing on the unit’s major topics and vocabulary that they can ultimately perform for whole class review.
Peer Review Strategies
Another engaging and effective review strategy is peer review. Students can partner to quiz each other on major topics and vocabulary from the unit of study. The teacher, students, or both can create review flash cards that can be used with student partners.
Student partners can stand and orally review; they can stand and switch partners on teacher demand; they can use the flashcards in a receptacle and take turns selecting; and they can use the flash cards quietly by filling in a teacher-designed review worksheet.
Incorporating Technology
Teachers should also be encouraged to use the internet to have fun review sessions with students. Many websites offer teachers resources to set up computer review games for students and web-hunts such as Scholastic and Discovery. Teachers should also tap into the knowledge students already possess about internet review activity opportunities as well as their awareness of review games in general.
Some might believe that traditional approaches to academic review are sufficient, such as textbook chapter review sections, review worksheets, or pre-assessments. Yet students often find these methods of review boring, and this decreases their motivation to review and retain the information.
Interactive and engaging activities that include opportunities for immediate feedback, such as those described above, produce higher rates of knowledge retention than isolated individual review activities. Utilizing such methods will create the social conditions that motivate students to learn and increase the potential that they will recall this information at a later date.
Teacher modeling and excitement is needed to maximize the effectiveness of these fun academic content review games. It is important that teachers demonstrate clearly how to play each review game or activity instructions. It is also just as important to explain each activity’s purpose and show enthusiasm about the possibilities of reviewing in such a dynamic way. Finding new and fun ways to engage students leads to success for both teachers and students.
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