😆 Epic Olympics review? Sounds like fun

💥 Don’t just teach. Create an experience!

That’s the heart of my book Tech Like a Pirate!

How can you use classroom tech to make learning memorable for students and create an experience?

It’s the techy follow-up book to Dave Burgess’s book Teach Like a Pirate. It was released during the pandemic — and it helped lots of teachers bring joy to their digital classrooms!

Make activities feel like students’ favorite social media. Infuse video like their favorite YouTube channels. All in pursuit of meaningful learning.

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💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

🎊 Epic Olympics Review: Engaging End-of-Year Classroom Activity

As the school year starts to come to a close, a couple of things are certain.

Student motivation will be soaring high. (Not!)

Reviewing previous content gets more and more important.

There are lots of ways to make review engaging, but my students have always responded to review games. They get the competitive juices flowing, and they put a new premium on knowing your stuff inside and out.

With the Summer Olympics coming up these review games created excitement in the classroom -- in Olympic proportions!

In my Spanish Class Olympics, we use lots of the common review games I've always incorporated into my class. For our Epic Olympics I just package them together in a weeklong cumulative competition. It gives students some extra incentive to come to class every day and bring their best!

Here are the resources you need to create your own Epic Olympic Games:

Theme Music

To create an Olympic atmosphere, the NBC theme music for the Olympics: Bugler’s Theme by Leo Arnaud was played as students entered the classroom.

Leaderboard

A Google Drawings leaderboard was updated daily to add a gamified element to the learning experience, with teams earning points based on their performance in the games.

🔗 Get the leaderboard template here

Schedule

To schedule the whole week, I picked five games my Olympic teams would play. You'll see some of the games in the sections below, but a week might look like this:

• Monday (Game 1): Trashketball

• Tuesday (Game 2): Trashketball (they REALLY liked trashketball)

• Wednesday (Game 3): Row wars

• Thursday (Game 4): Flyswatters

• Friday (Game 5): Kahoot!

Games

🗑️ Trashketball: This game involved shooting crumpled paper into a trash can for points, with different shooting lines marked for varying point values.

⠿ Row Wars: A fast-paced game where students answered rapid-fire questions, with each round involving five terms to define or recall quickly. Make a copy of the Row Wars cards (Google Docs)

🪰 Flyswatters: A game that likely involved using flyswatters to quickly hit the correct answers to questions displayed in the classroom. Copy the flyswatter game grid for your projector screen (Google Docs)

🎮 Kahoot!, Quizizz, Quizlet Live, Gimkit, Blooket: These are various popular quiz-based games that can be used to review content in an engaging, competitive format.

💡Learn more about Epic Olympics

These ideas are from End the school year with Epic Review Olympics (free templates!) click on the link to read the whole post.

🎯 Quick Teaching Strategy

✏️ Check for understanding with a class sketchnote

At the end of class, ask students to draw, doodle, diagram, etc. a part of the lesson they remembered on the whiteboard/chalkboard at the front of class.

Seeing everyone’s responses in one place is a fun visual experience. Plus, when you see lots of similar responses — or a lack of certain responses! — it can show you what stuck and what didn’t.

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!