Creative Ways to Review

The end of the year is always full of review before cumulative assessments.  The challenge for teachers is how to make the review fun and interactive for the kids yet still beneficial for them to review on their previously learned topics.  I am not a worksheet kind of teacher, so here are two of the ways I reviewed with my students before the big AP Biology Exam...(keep in mind they don't just have to be used for the advanced classes...it can be applied to any content area).

1.  Pretty Colors
For some reason...kids are always impressed with pretty colors, especially against dark backgrounds.  So I let them draw on the tables.  I have the black lab tables in my room and we used the Expo Window Markers. 

 Then I told them to draw a plant and animal cell on one side of the tables and a phospholipid bilayer on the other side.

 

  This is what they came up with!  Then we walked through everyone's drawings and fixed mistakes, added missing things, labeled and discussed functions.  It really led the kids to actively discuss and interact with each other.  We did this for several days with many different topics and every day the kids were highly engaged and had fun.

*I do give credit for this idea to a colleague of mine, Cassie Miller.  She came up with it is fantastic!*

2. Vocabulary Puzzle
For genetics, there is a lot of vocabulary and working out problems.  My kids had no problem with the example problems but kept getting the vocab confused...so I developed a little game. This is the idea...

 
Where you have shapes that have either terms, definitions or descriptions on all sides of a piece.  Then they match up with another piece to link a term and its description and then pair up all sides.  So i decided to make one with our genetics terms. Here is a picture of my kids working on it....

 

I told them it will make some sort of shape......and when they finish they get this! 

Its supposed to be a dog...they said it looked like a cat.  But it was a fun way to review vocab terms. Fair warning, it is a bit of work to but it all together, but i thought it was a lot of fun and the kids liked it. 

Good luck reviewing!