Games to play instead of playing the worksheet game

Most games involve collaboration, often in the possibly contradictory form of competition. The benefits of playing games stretch beyond the curriculum (in its smaller, National Curriculum sense): pupils can develop strategic thinking, memorising skills, logical reasoning and more.  Pupils will probably engage more enthusiastically with games than with worksheets.  Games allow you to recycle materials: instead of photocopying all those worksheets you could invest in a few reusable resources.  You still need to think about what you want children to achieve in the lesson and decide how the game needs to be adapted.  Here are some suggestions:

Pelmanism.  Infinite variations of the turn-over-two-cards-to-find-a-matching-pair game. Find a pair of adverbs...a pair of prime numbers...a pair of parallelograms...  Some more ideas here: http://edition.tefl.net/ideas/games/32-variations-on-pelmanism/

Consequences.  Pupils collaboratively generate sentences or simple story structures.  Opportunities to practice using speech marks and other punctuation.  The rules are here: http://m.wikihow.com/Play-Consequences

I went to the shop.  Adaptable memory game, with opportunities to develop simple extended sentences and lists; opportunities to practice use of indefinite article.  Child 1: "I went to the shop and bought an apple."  Child 2: "I went to the shop and bought an apple and a banana."  Child 3: "I went to the shop and bought an apple, a banana and a concertina."  Some further suggestions here: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/language-assistant/games/i-went-shops

Guess Who.  (I've never understood what the question mark is doing there.) Encourages pupils to frame questions ("Does your person have a red beard?" etc.), supports comprehension development, and logical reasoning.  What more could you ask?  For more ideas see: http://www.speech-language-development.com/guess-who.html

Top Trumps.  Develops strategic thinking, interpretation of information texts, retention of facts.  The National Children's Bureau evaluation of the Schools Top Trumps Tournament (2011) concluded that playing Top Trumps had "positive learning outcomes for children in terms of literacy, numeracy and decision-making skills".

Mastermind.  Develop logic skills, design effective experiments, and discuss scientific reasoning in the classroom.  Have a look at Strom and Barolo's paper, "Using the Game of Mastermind to Teach, Practice, and Discuss Scientific Reasoning Skills" (2011).  

9 things you could do instead of using a worksheet

1. Understanding word problems.  Pupils could create their own sets of questions (based on a question/process you've modelled). You may need to provide some word/phrase banks to get them started.  They can swap the questions amongst themselves and respond.  They can evaluate the questions - if they're too easy they can try to work out how to make them harder.  

2.  Understanding sentence construction or parts of speech.  Pupils could collaboratively generate sentences, passing folded pieces of paper around the table (in the style of consequences).  Each child starts the sentence with a name or article + noun ("John" or "The house", for example) then folds the paper to hide the word/phrase and passes the paper to the child to the left who writes a verb ("runs" or "contemplated", for example).  The round continues (you'll have several pieces of paper circulating at once), with at each stop the addition of another part of speech.  The next one could be adverb ("cautiously" or "often", for example).  You decide an end point and then open up the pieces of paper to reveal the sentences: "John runs cautiously."  "The house contemplated often."  You could add further rules: For this round each word must begin with a T.

3.  Articulating knowledge about a subject.  Pupils could create a mind map or a poster or a display or a presentation.

4. Measuring (length, area, perimeter, etc).  Pupils could draw shapes then find the perimeter or area.  Squared paper might be useful.  Pupils could draw shapes with a perimeter of precisely x cm.  How many rectangles can you draw with a perimeter of precisely 12 cm? 

5.  Presenting research.  Pupils could design their own templates for presenting findings (and then use and evaluate them).

6.  Sentence construction.  Provide a stimulus (a picture, for example) and get pupils to describe what they see.  In the distance there is a snow-capped mountain.  Beside the river a small man with a dog is walking.  This should be a speaking and listening activity, at least to start with.  If children can construct sentences through talk they'll have a better chance of being able to write sentences on paper.

7.  Practising mathematical operations.  Give pupils selections of numbers.  They choose which ones to use to practice the operation you've been working on.  They understand the meaning of challenge (because you have high expectations and have ensured that learning is challenging), so if they find practising with a certain set of numbers too easy, they know to look for numbers that present a more demanding challenge.

8.  Articulating knowledge/understanding/opinion derived from an image/map/artefact. Pupils could think and talk about what they see.  Like you would.  Adults don't look at maps, or paintings, or a Ming dynasty jug, or listen to a piece of music and then fill in a worksheet - they think and talk...about how long it might take to drive from San Diego to Yosemite, about what makes Duchamp's Fountain art, about the blue and white dragon handle, about whether Andy Williams is better than Pharrell Williams.  To facilitate this with children you'll need to get them to think about questions.  And you'll need to model ways of talking about images and artefacts.

Fountain (1917) attributed to Marcel Duchamp

Dragon-handled jug Ming dynasty, early 15th century CE

9.  Practising mathematical operations II.  Here's the answer.  What's the question?  How many different ways can you make x?  Or you could add rules to make it into an investigation: How many ways can you make 48 by multiplying two numbers together?  ...Three different numbers together? ...Four different numbers together?  Is there a pattern?  What is it?  Can you work out the formula?

How closed questions shape misconceptions

Which one is the rectangle?

It's the sort of question that you'll hear in lots of classrooms.  The purpose of the question is to assess pupils' knowledge.  There are problems with this kind of question.  The structure of the question implies that you expect one correct answer.  Responses will either be in line with what you expect ("correct") or conflict with what you expect ("wrong" or "interesting").  Pupils either will know or won't know the answer, or in this case either will know or won't know the answer that you're expecting.  With closed questions like this it will often be a case of guessing the answer that the teacher is looking for.

Worksheets are part of the problem.  They close options, they narrow understanding, they invite a uniform response.

Ask an open-ended question instead.

Ask

What are the properties of these shapes?

What are the common features of these shapes?

How could you describe this shape using mathematical language?

If you were using a Venn diagram to sort these shapes, what headings would you use for each of the sets?




This isn't just about shapes but shapes do provide a straightforward way of making the point.

So back to the opening question: Which one is the rectangle?

The problem with the question is that both A and B are rectangles - there isn't one, there are two.  A square is a rectangle (a quadrilateral with 2 pairs of parallel sides and 4 right angles).   Incidentally, a square is also a rhombus (a quadrilateral with 2 pairs of parallel sides and 4 sides of equal length) and a parallelogram (a quadrilateral with 2 pairs of parallel sides).

Why homework needs more thinking

Picture this.  It's the end of Thursday or Friday afternoon and you're handing out a worksheet to each child to take home with maths or comprehension questions to complete or spellings to learn or class work to finish.  What's wrong with this?

The problem isn't about children spending insufficient time playing or the disruption to quality family time.  Homework was never intended to be something that helped families bond or enabled children to play more.  The problem with homework is that too often it has no effective impact on learning.  Why?

1) Homework provides opportunities for pupils to consolidate misunderstanding or to learn things wrongly.  This isn't the fault of parents/carers.  If you want a child to learn something, sort it out in school.  (Of course there's the stuff that children learn at home, from interacting with people and things outside school, but I'm talking about homework, set by teachers for children to do when they're not at school.)

2) Homework too often emphasises or extends the gap between high and low achievers.  Let's imagine you've set the same five multiplication problems as homework for all, the children who get it will complete successfully, the children who don't, won't.  (This is a problem with worksheets in general.)  

3) You have no way of accurately monitoring who did what.  Some parents/carers will complete the questions on behalf of their children - so the children won't have understood how to do it but you'll think they have.  And some parents/carers will complete the work incorrectly.

4) Some parents/carers are better equipped to support their children than others.  Often these will be the parents/carers of the most able pupils in your class.  So, again, homework will serve to widen the gap between the least and the most able child.

5) Homework creates unnecessary workload, particularly if you're expected to mark work which children (or parents/carers) complete at home.  This reduces your time to focus on learning and teaching in the classroom.

What's the solution?  Your school will have homework policy ("...parents and school working in partnership...regular homework...linked to the taught curriculum...") and Teachers' Standard 4 requires that you set homework to consolidate and extend the knowledge and understanding pupils have acquired.  The government have stepped back from telling schools how many hours of homework a 5-year old should do so there's nothing stopping you (within the bounds of the school homework policy) from deciding what to ask pupils to do.  So when you're setting homework, make it something that children can take ownership of, that doesn't contribute to widening the gap between more and less able, that allows you to check on misconceptions or misunderstandings, and that doesn't add to your marking workload.  How?

• Set tasks which don't  necessarily involve writing or recording on paper.  These could be "Think about..." activities, observation or physical/kinaesthetic activities.
• Link these tasks to lessons you'll be teaching in a couple of days, or next week.  Be clear with your pupils that the set task is in preparation for such-and-such lesson.
• Use the introduction of this lesson as an opportunity to hear children's contributions and adjust the homework tasks you set to ensure that all children can participate.

For example:  Think about why some people walk to work, others drive, and some cycle or use public transport (in preparation for a lesson on writing a balanced argument or a geography lesson on urban transport choices).  Or: Sit in as many different chairs as you can find (in preparation for a D&T or history project on furniture design).  Or Look for right angles around your home (in preparation for a lesson on the properties of shapes).

9 reasons why worksheets don’t work

It depends, of course, on what you mean by “work”.  If you want something that you can put together (or download) without thinking too hard, that might keep a few pupils in your classroom occupied for a few minutes, that might (if you provide different worksheets for different groups) provide some uncritical evidence of differentiation, then worksheets might do the job.  But if your classroom is about learning and progress and celebrating difference then forget worksheets.  Below I've listed nine reasons why I think this. Throughout, ask yourself why you wanted to become a teacher.

1. Worksheets make lessons task-oriented rather than learning-oriented.  In a worksheet-dependent lesson, the objective for the lesson becomes be able to complete the worksheet rather than understand how to… or be able to explain the reasons for… or I can evaluate a range of… Planning can be difficult, but reaching for a default worksheet to slot into a lesson will pull you away from thinking about what you want pupils to learn, away from thinking about what you want pupils to understand or be able to do at the end of your lesson that they couldn’t do at the start.
2. They emphasise quantity rather than quality as a measure of success.  How many have you done? becomes the key question rather than How well do you understand this? Worksheets encourage superficiality. 
3. Worksheets are intrinsically unchallenging.  Pupils either can or can’t do the tasks required to complete the worksheet.  If pupils can, they’ll finish quickly or be unchallenged or both.  If they can’t, they can’t: they’ll spend the allotted time completing the tasks incorrectly or they will disengage.   Perhaps you’ve created a worksheet in which the task is more open-ended, or encourages a collaborative approach (see Reason 6) to complete set tasks – that’s great, but ask yourself if you really need a worksheet to do this.
4. Worksheets create glass ceilings.  Once the worksheet is complete, that’s it: the pupil can go no further.  This is true for your most and your least able pupil: the tasks on a worksheet are finite.  You might have included extension activities, but these too are finite.  Perhaps you’ve created a worksheet in which the task is more open-ended or which invites pupils to devise their own extension activities – that’s great, but ask yourself if you couldn’t build this sense of pupil ownership into the culture of your classroom. 
5. They invite uniformity. If you want to create a generation of robotic clones, then stick to worksheets.  But if you became a teacher because you wanted to inspire creativity, celebrate difference, foster independence, then bin the worksheets.  Or recycle them (see Reason 9).  Teachers’ Standard 2 requires you to “encourage pupils to take a responsible and conscientious attitude to their own work”.  I can see how a pupil might conscientiously complete a worksheet, but does a worksheet really invite a pupil to take responsibility?
6. Worksheets discourage collaboration.  Six pupils, each with a worksheet, sitting at the same table are unlikely to collaborate – they may even have been told not to.  Teachers often refer to this gathering of pupils as a “group”, but when they’ve each got a worksheet this is a group only in a mathematical sense, grouped together like so many apples or bananas.  The challenges and opportunities of working as a group will hardly come into it: they don’t need to deal with group dynamics (there aren’t any), to devise a way to pool their resources (they’re often told not to), to motivate or engage one another or take responsibility for anything other than the completion of the worksheet in front of them.  (Is this really what you want Teachers’ Standard 2 to be about?)  And what happened to social constructivism?  All that stuff that Vygotsky spouted about “problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers”?  Perhaps you’ve created a worksheet that has collaborative activity built in (perhaps a single sheet which a group share) – that’s great, in fact I’d suggest that’s no longer a worksheet but something different (a challenge, a task, a problem).
7. They prevent pupils from devising their own ways of recording their understanding or for presenting their findings.  Worksheets are often about filling in boxes: the teacher provides the question or the grid or the table, the pupil writes the answer or fills in the box.  This prepares pupils to complete questionnaires and respond to surveys. Get pupils to devise their own ways to present their understanding – this will reveal lots about what they understand – and if you’re concerned that pupils won’t be able to devise ways by themselves, that’s what modeling is for.  After all, if you don’t give them a chance to devise their own methods, how are they going to become independent, problem-solving communicators?
8. They create more work for teachers.  You have to design, print, photocopy, and distribute worksheets.  Then you have to collect them in and stick them in pupils’ books – unless you’ve got the pupils to stick them into their books as part of the lesson (Learning objective: I can stick a worksheet into my book). 
9. Worksheets waste paper.  Why photocopy something which pupils then stick to another sheet?