At Hill House we believe learning is collaborative. Teachers work with pupils to create lessons that are dynamic, exciting and promote deep learning. We believe in helping our learners reach independence and encourage them to always strive for excellence. We believe pupils should be encouraged to take responsibility, embrace risks, persevere, enjoy challenges and above all love learning.
Mystery Gift: Reveal a mystery object or gift to your class then provide the pupils with three different statements about what the gift is or how it is related to that lesson. Two of the statements are false + one is correct. The pupils need to decide what the correct statement is.
Incorporating a timed activity in your lesson helps pupils to remain focused and enables them to prepare for working under pressure. Simply choose the amount of time for the task to be completed and share it with the class.
Examples of timers can be found at: https://www.online-stopwatch.com/classroom-timers/
Christmas Decorations: As a plenary ask pupils to write or draw what they think they have learnt from the lesson onto a decoration shape. These decorations could then be hung up in the classroom or stuck to the whiteboard.
This is a simple but effective way to start or end a lesson. Instead of telling pupils what the starter or plenary for your lesson is, allow pupils to select the task. Based on the idea of Santa’s sack, pupils dip into a bag or sack to select the starter or plenary for the lesson.
Connect 4: A fun interactive game used for consolidation and the identification of gaps in knowledge. Pupils create challenging questions for their classmates and make a record of the answers. Pupils, using their own devices to play the game, socially distanced against their peers.
Fortune Teller Revision: Create challenging questions, put them into a fortune teller and play in 'speed dating' style.
Lockdown Time Capsule: A fun way to look back on the COVID-19 pandemic in years to come
Name it + Explain it! Using the letters on the card provided, pupils name a key term or a key point and explain and elaborate on it's significance to the topic. Great for recall and literacy.
Retrieval Relay: A great collaborative recall task. Pupils fill in everything they can remember then pass onto their peers who fill in everything they can remember without repeating anything already written. With thanks to @87History
Cops and Robbers! Pupils consolidate their learning and then collaborate with classmates to rob as much information as they can. Thanks to @87history and @thelazyteacher for this idea.
Noughts + Crosses: Post-It note challenge. Answer questions on a post-it note and beat your partner to completing three in a row. A fun and competitive retrieval task.
Constructing Complex Calculations: Students have enjoyed working collaboratively to sequence together answers to examination questions. Excellent for confidence building!