It’s getting to the nitty gritty time of the current term. If there was a miracle, and you taught a book alone, you could have paces yourself well enough to assure that you have enough material for the remaining classes. The likelihood of this diminishes for every teacher you add to the book series through the week. In some of my classes, three or more teachers share the same book, which means that if one person went long, or did too much, someone’s going to end up needing to think of activities to do to make up for that time later on.
One such class of mine has required me to think creatively about class materials for the past week, since I’ve been in danger of finishing the book way earlier than I should have. I’ve got two or three more classes, and perhaps a single page or less material for each. This means that I planned a spelling bee for one of my classes today. We had done a dictionary style review sheet in the previous class, where students looked up words that fit into different categories and then wrote them on a word list. I assigned these lists as the word pool for the spelling bee.
Today, I arranged the class so that my desk was at the back, and the students would sit in a row of chairs facing me. This is a way to keep them organized, as well as break the class more easily into groups according to their results. I did an elimination style spelling bee, but with a twist. For any incorrect word, the next student got a chance to spell it. If they got it correct, they knocked out any previous spellers that got it wrong. This meant that to be the best speller, the students paid attention to each other and listened to how the people before them attempted to spell words. I immediately stopped students when they made a mistake, so good listeners could remember where the person before them made a mistake.
The problem with achievement based competitions are the lazy students that intentionally fail to be "out". If the price of not spelling a word is sitting around bored for an hour, some students are going to choose the alternative to studying every time. To discourage such behavior, I did three things. I limited the categories to ten or less words. That meant that bad spellers never had to wait too long to get back into the game to try again. I awarded winners who survived a round of good spelling by giving prizes. I also punished students that were out. Every word I gave to students in the game they had to write in their notebook multiple times. They had to find the word in the book and copy it down. This kept them busy, listening, and improved their spelling at the same time. It also stopped people from failing on purpose.
We went five rounds before the class ran out of time. The better listeners and spellers knocked out the people that were chatty every time. One of the problems I had was that because I didn’t assign seating, between rounds students would jockey for position at different seats. Some students wanted to follow bad spellers, others wanted to follow good spellers in hope they would knock out a hard word before it got to them. I could have assigned seating to cut down on seat switching, but it was only a minor annoyance. If someone couldn’t spell well, it really wouldn’t matter where they were to begin.
The most important thing of the spelling bee was the fact that most of the students were excellent writers and spellers for their age already. They were the elite of the age, so no word I gave them from the book was too hard. Had I tried it in the lower class at the same age, most of the students wouldn’t have been able to make a decent attempt before being knocked out. The challenge level was good enough that the students weren’t complaining, but at the same time it wasn’t easy enough for people to get bored.
