Substitute teaching can be a tough gig at the best of times. Even a dream class can become unsettled with a temporary teacher, so being prepared with a repertoire of interesting and fun activities will aid your chances of having an enjoyable and rewarding teaching day. Here are 3 simple, yet effective, quick lesson ideas to engage classes of any age.
How Many Words?
Play a game called How Many Words with the class. Students of all ages love this task. Write a sentence on the board, ideally no more than 7 words long. Any sentence is fine for this activity but something age appropriate and entertaining is more likely to engage the class … alternatively a generic sentence like: “I love weekends - hooray for Friday!” usually works well.
Using only the letters found in the sentence, students are to list as many words as possible – of course students will start by listing the individual words of the sentence in their count, but that’s fine. The class will probably need reminding that if a letter does not appear anywhere in the sentence it cannot be used to construct a word. This activity tends to keep a class busy for ages and can even be run with students working in pairs. Add a small reward for the student or pair who can find the most number of words and this activity is a winner!
Create Character Profiles
Who, Who and Who is an activity which will require a little preparation but is well worth it. Once prepared, this resource can be used over and over at very short notice with classes of any age. Trawl through some old magazines and cut out a range of people, male and female, young and old, the more varied the better! To make a longer lasting resource it is a good idea to mount these on cardboard and laminate them.
For a class of 30 students you will need at least 100+ magazine “people”. Pass the collection around and have each student select 3 “people”. For each image selected they are to construct a character profile under the headings:- name, age, physical characteristics, occupation, family, friends, hobbies, likes/dislikes and goals/dreams.
If time is available, it is then a great imaginative activity to have students plan how their 3 characters could interact in a short story and prepare an introductory paragraph!
Pass the Numbers Math Game
Pass the Numbers is a quick and easy math teaching activity which involves students preparing and answering as many short math sums as possible in a limited period of time. To start this activity, each student will need a piece of paper to write out 5 math sums involving addition, subtraction, multiplication and/or division.
After having a few minutes to prepare a set of questions, each student passes his questions to the person at his right. Each student then answers the set of questions just passed to her and so on as questions are passed around the class. When this is done to a strict timeframe and the swapping of questions is in tune with a teacher’s bell or whistle, it is a fun and snappy numeracy task.
On occasions where the regular class teacher has been unable to leave set work, or when the work which has been left gets completed in record time, launching one or more of the above activities will ensure any substitute teacher survives the day unscathed!
