Playing Educational Games in The Secondary Classroom

Some people think that playing educational games in the classroom is only for elementary school. Some people think that with all the mandates from state exams and getting ready for college that the secondary classroom has to be boring to be rigorous.

I teach in the inner city and my students need fun and innovative ways to learn. Students today don't have the attention span that students had when I was growing up. You can blame technology for that. Although my generation had TV and video games, I was in the generation that went through high school without the internet and definitely without cell phones. Although technology makes life much easier I am thankful that I grew up in a time-period before it took over our lives.

For the most part my students dislike reading. One thing I have always done is create Jeopardy review games before unit tests. I used to do this by hand and write on my chalkboard (go ahead and laugh). In 2012 I got a smartboard in my room and all of a sudden I was able to take my teaching to the next level. I use the website http://www.superteachertools.us/jeopardyx/ to create my own jeopardy games. You can save them on your account or simply email yourself the link. I love this site. You can also find games on there already. You can create other games on that site as well.

The NY State Exam (The Regents) has literary terms on it. Literary terms are also part of the Common Core State Standards. My students have always struggled remembering these terms. This is why I always have a word wall in my room with these terms. Last year I created a Literary Terms Bingo Game for my 11th graders. We played it on a day before a vacation early in the year. I gave out free homework passes as prizes. The kids had so much fun that we ended up playing the game (by request) every time we had either a half day or it was the day before vacation. I ended up posting this review game in my TpT Store.

Literary Terms Bingo

Jeopardy had always been my go to for review games but to be honest with some classes the game got too loud. Playing with two teams sometimes leads to students making fun of each other when they win. When playing bingo it's every man (or woman) for themselves. This school year I decided to create bingo games to review difficult works of literature. Since my students have always struggled with Shakespeare I decided to start with that. So far I've created bingo review games for five of Shakespeare's plays. They're a fun way to review characters, symbols and terms in the plays. I plan on making more of these review games in the future for other works of literature.

Hamlet Bingo

Romeo and Juliet Bingo

Macbeth Bingo

Othello Bingo

A Midsummer Night's Dream Bingo

There's no reason why students can't have fun and learn at the same time no matter what age they are.