Teachers don’t necessarily think of themselves as creative and I am one of those! However, I keep telling myself that there’s no need to feel like I have to be a Picasso or a Mozart to come up with a creative lesson. Creativity comes in many shapes and forms. For example, I am really good at taking a Pinterest idea and putting my own spin to it. Ha! Ok, don’t roll your eyes! Why can’t I call that creativity? I am also good at coming up with ideas once I see something inspiring. Like the other day, when I was in the Dollar Store and I saw tiny red plastic hearts! My creative lightbulb went off and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with those hearts: A.Valentine’s.Day.Surgery.Room.Transformation! Boom! Right there, in the store, I had half my activity already mapped out! If that’s not creativity, what is? I bet you often do the same, but forget to give yourself credit for it.
So here’s what I did next: I looked around for some more props and the cute plush monkeys in the Valentine’s Day colors stood out. They were perfect. I bought one for each of my students. I decided those monkeys will be the patients in my lessons and my students will be allowed to keep their patients at the end of the lesson, take them home, and continue to care for them.
Patients? Check! Now onto decor! My motto: beg, borrow, repurpose! Before I got to my car, I had already messaged a few neighborhood friends that were in the medical field. I asked for an IV pole, IV bags, syringes, cotton swabs, tongue depressors. My message ended something like “… I’ll take anything that you can spare and you think it would be safe and fun for the kids to manipulate”. I had plenty of masks, gloves, blood bags, surgical uniforms, and hair and shoe covers from a previous room transformation, so all I needed was a few more items on my props table to make the setup a bit more visually appealing. I ended up with a pretty good stash of medical supplies!
Next, I needed some white bedding to create my operating room. So I sent a message to my students’ parents asking for any size white sheets and they sure hooked me up quickly! The rest was easy! I knew the content I needed to tackle, so I just layered some fun elements on top of it, and …VOILA!
I added an extra sheet to enclose the operating area for a more intimate look and I added a few signs outside the area and in the hallway leading up to my room. Upon entering, each student was given a badge.
I was contemplating filling the IV bags with some colored water, but I decided against it for fear the plug will come undone and I will end up with a mini flood on the carpet. Maybe next year I’ll fidget with it and figure out how to seal the plug. It will add to the visual appeal, for sure.
The content, as always, matched what my students were working on on that day: sight words, CVC nonsense words, fluency and comprehension skills on grade level passages, multiplication facts, ten frames, additions and subtractions within 0-20, number concepts, alphabet concepts, phonemic awareness… All the skills outlined in my students’ IEPs from Kindergarten to third grade!
To make it fun, I inserted a challenge to the activities: each doctor, aka student, was assigned a patient. They had to solve their tasks within a certain amount of time in order to save the patients. For my second and third graders who could handle a bit of pressure and a bit of (morbid) fun, I shrunk the time factor: they were working on reading fluency, so I gave them one minute to read a passage in order to save their patient. The timed fluency wasn’t new after all. That’s what we do with Dibels every week, but the patient aspect added to the fun and also to the pressure. I heard from some of the “doctors” that trying to save the patient in one minute was quite nerve wracking.
To differentiate, the passages were labeled 1-6, with 1 being the easiest. The passages were written like they were injury reports. In each patient’s file there was some personal information that could be used for math activities.
I also differentiated the some of the words the students were given. You can use different color hearts. The Dollar stores sell pink and red.
To add some extra fun, I ordered a few syringe pens from Amazon. You can also buy them on clearance at the Halloween stores, right after the holiday. They also sell blood bags that can be filled with juice and given out at the end of the class. Our school has banned food from the classrooms, so, unfortunately, I cannot take advantage of this, but if you can, I highly recommend it! It’s a lot of fun for the kids!
As I think of ways to make the activities more engaging, I always try to incorporate multi-sensory activities and include real life objects. In this case, I added some candy hearts to the ten frames for my Kindergarteners. One of the teachers at our school, had a brain made out of cauliflower. Her students had a blast!
One of my favorite hooks is adding sound effects to the activities I create. The room was quiet at times, as the students were really focused on their work to “save the patients”, so playing a soundtrack of rhythmic heart beats from YouTube really enhanced the atmosphere for this activity.
If you are interested in trying your hand at open heart or maybe brain surgery, you can find the resources I created for my students in my TPT store. A lot of the activities are editable, so you can adapt them to your students’ levels and the content you will be targeting. I wish you good luck and I hope you have just as much fun as I did!
