Monday, May 20, 2024
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Rock Your School Day!

Glow Games 2019!

September is a very busy month for educators! The school year is hardly underway with procedures and rules to be learned, with transitions and routines to be mastered, lessons and activities to be prepared, and so much more! And yet, teachers around the world embark on a fun adventure that takes up A.LOT.OF.PLANNING: Rock Your School Day! Rock Your School Day is a movement to create outside-the-box experiences for students, a way to engage and captivate them, to deliver boring, ordinary content in an extraordinary way!

Rock Your School Day in the resource setting looks challenging, but it is far from being impossible. Here’s how it went down for me.

STEP #1: ROOM SETUP. The hardest part was deciding what theme to pick for the special day. There are soooo many options out there! This is year I went with a glow-in-the-dark theme. I wanted to devote more time preparing the actual activities than setting up my room, and a glow room is really easy to set up, so it only made sense to go with that. My partner teacher had some games from a previous lesson: Jenga, Tic-Tac-Toe, bowling, and ring toss, all glow in the dark, so that’s what we used for the actual glow games. We covered the windows and some parts of the walls with black trash bags and set up three black lights in various parts of the classroom. The kids wore glow in the dark hats and glasses made of glow sticks. We also had glow in the dark M&Ms as prizes for the games. A special admission ticket went home a couple days before to create some anticipation excitement. The only clue the students were given was to wear white or neon clothes.

STEP #2: PREPARATION OF INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS. I had eight different groups for the day, working on different skills, from decoding to subtracting to social skills. I could have a done a lesson to address a general topic and only adjust the complexity level based on what grade level the students were in, but I decided to teach what I would normally do with each group and just make it glow in the dark. Well, that was a little bit of a mistake, because that was precisely what made planning challenging. However, with careful considerations and solid planning, it turned out to be quite fun. I will show you what each group worked on in Step #3.

I anticipated that it would be extremely hard to function in the dark, so I had all materials stored in separate pouches, per grade level, for quick and easy access.

STEP #3: LET THE GLOW GAMES BEGIN! Each group stayed in the resource room for 30-45 minutes. Initially I thought I would have to shorten the instructional part of each class by 5 minutes in order to give the students a chance to engage with the games, but it turned out that they worked so much faster than usual just so they can have multiple turns at each station. For those haters out there who think room transformations are just fluff, I have some news: zero instructional time was lost in the process and the kids had a blast! No one asked to use the restroom, no one asked to take a break, no one was tired, no one had their head down. Everyone was fully engaged and asked for more exercises and more problems to solve just so they can have more turns playing the games. How is that for engagement? I’d say 100% would be an understatement!

Here are the groups and what each worked on:

GROUP 1: Social scenarios. There were six different situations (classroom, library, hallway, at home, etc) color coded to match the colors of the Jenga blocks. Students had to read each scenario and provide the right way to act in that situation. They drawn the scenario from the different piles based on the color of the Jenga piece they wanted to remove.
GROUP 2: Using comprehension strategies such as visualizing, inferencing, and predicting, students answered comprehension questions, in writing, from a previously studied text. Students also worked on mentor sentences and grammar (nouns and verbs). Tic-Tac-Toe was played for the grammar part of the lesson.
GROUP 3: Students matched lowercase and uppercase letters, wrote letters with attention to correct letter formation using highlighters, and “built” letters out of neon pompons. After each completed activity, students got to bowl.
GROUP 4: This group’s goals were reading CVC and beginning blends, as well as increasing reading fluency.
GROUP 5: The students in this group were working on decoding multisillabic words as well as reading different Fry word lists. Based on their individual goals, copies of the Fry lists were made on Astrobright paper, and each player got the Fry list corresponding to their goals.
Group 6: I couldn’t play too much around with the content of the 6th grade assignments for the day because the teacher had given the students in my group very specific instructions on what they should work on. The only thing I could alter was the color of the paper they were working on. Regardless, the students were extremely excited and even got to play an extra game as a reward for working extremely fast!
GROUP 7: Reading fluency. Students had to spin the top and read as fast as they could until the spinner stopped, then try to beat their own record.
GROUP 8: Students practiced multiplication facts.
Some of the materials I used were just free downloads from TpT. That saved me a lot of time. Trying to reinvent the wheel is not something you want to do while prepping for a room transformation!


Rock Your School Day is in the books! Now let’s create some magic throughout the entire year!
Diana T. Sylvander
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