Hey all!  It’s Staci from Let’s Teach Something Blog back again. This time, I’m here to show you how I help my students anchor their learning using interactive notebooks and a trivia assessment game.

Interactive Notebooks

Let me give you a picture of what my teaching looks like. My 2nd graders have 2 interactive notebooks: one math, one reading.  When I introduce a new skill, we always put it in our notebook to anchor our learning.  The students are encouraged to look back in their interactive notebooks if they are unsure of what a skill should look like.  It’s an amazing learning tool that I’ve just started using this year, and I love, love, love it.  I’ve been creating pages as I go, so it’s a work in progress!

Trivia Assessment

We’ve become masters at creating reference material for ourselves in our notebooks…and lots of it!  I needed a formative assessment to see how my students understand concepts of these different math and reading skills.  A test of this magnitude would be very time consuming!  So, I decided we were just going to play a good ‘ol fashioned Jeopardy-style trivia game.

To create the trivia game, I used letters from Sassy Circle Letters Pack (similar circle letters found here), wrote some questions on the backs of them, and hung them on my whiteboard, and the game was ready to go.  I also have some student buzzers that help identify which team rang in first.  The students love the game, and ask for it often!

Here’s a twist to the trivia game:  I sometimes put blank letters at centers before and asked the students to come up with a question and then at the end of the week, we put them altogether for a Jeopardy trivia game mash-up.  This alternative really gets the kids invested in creating QUALITY questions!  The rule:  if it’s your own question, you are not allowed to answer it!

Need more teaching tips? Here are 5 Best Practices for Teaching Math and see some great center ideas here.