EOY Genre Collaborations

 The library media center is such a great place for teachers to find support, get out of the classroom, and learn. Last week we had an eighth grade teacher who reached out looking for something to engage her students for EOY review and get them thinking about genres and author purpose. My co-librarian and I happily put our heads together and bounced ideas around until we had something we thought would engage students who were dreaming of summer.

GimKit is an awesome resource, very similar to Kahoot if you haven't used it before. We found a genre quiz that had already been created there, adjusted it slightly to suit our library, and used it to open our lesson. The students and teacher jumped in, testing their skills against each other, but in a more peaceful way than Kahoot. It was great!

After they were refreshed on those genre characteristics, we had them partner with the person next to them and gave each team a genre. Using their mad genre knowledge, they had to come up with two truths and a lie about their genre. The conversations were awesome as they tried to figure out what to write to stump their classmates.

At this point, they had been sitting for long enough, so we migrated away from the tables to a circle of chairs we had set up with a stool in the middle. On the stool there was a buzzer, strategically placed so that it was equal distance from the chairs. We explained that we were going to play Two Truths and a Lie with what they had just come up with. There were interested looks between the buzzer and us.

The rules were if it was what you had written, you couldn't answer (or give the answer). Otherwise, when they heard the lie read aloud they had to stand up, spin in a circle and then dash to be the first to hit the buzzer. If they did that and were able to say the lie, then they earned a piece of candy. The candy won them over and had them listening intently to hear the answers. We did have a group later in the day who were lazy and would just rush the buzzer for each answer, but overall it did what we were hoping it would and the teacher and her class were beaming and laughing as they left.