Ideas for 'Early Finishers'

mochacoffee

Sun, Sep 17 2017, 7:11 pm

In my years teaching 5th and 6th grade, I've always prepared an 'activity sheet' for students that complete work early. I teach general studies and like to include at least one thinking word game. I make the sheet double sided in case some students don't like one activity. I'll include things like boggle, word searches (most popular), coloring sheet (with the understanding that once class continues, markers go away in 3 seconds or less), crossword puzzles, make words (have a long word like NEWSPAPER and students have to find as many words as they can using those letters), riddles, brain teasers, connect the dots, rebus puzzles, I spy, mazes, etc. Basically anything students can do quietly that gets them involved and sometimes thinking. I leave the pile on the corner of my desk and students know when they finish work early they may come up and take an activity sheet to work on.

That's for general studies and slightly older kids, but I'm sure a lot of that can still pass for Judaic studies and younger grades. Maybe chinuch.org has ideas of one page activities for students to do.

There's also an adorable kids printable newspaper that a principal once told me about and I've been using ever since. It's called The Mini Page. It was a kid paper printed years ago (like a very very long time ago), I can't remember when but I know they have some updated ones. Even the old ones that aren't about science, are still relevant. It's 3-4 pages of information, riddles, connect the dots etc. all geared towards kids. My students enjoy those very much.

nicole81

Sun, Sep 17 2017, 7:26 pm

If some students are finishing early, the work isn't sufficiently challenging. Coloring and puzzles are usually busy work, which I think is a waste of educational time. For every worksheet that you use, is it possible to create extension questions that promote deeper thinking and application for those students who have the time to get to them?

mochacoffee

Sun, Sep 17 2017, 7:37 pm

nicole81 wrote:

The first part of your statement, in my opinion, is incorrect. If you give out a worksheet that should take 15 minutes, you will always have students that finish after 10 minutes or 12 minutes. We're talking about 5 minutes here and there. Not a half hour at a time. 5 minutes of doing a puzzle until time to hand in an assignment isn't wasting time. 1-3rd grades can't handle deeper thinking questions in such short periods of time when it's choppy throughout the day.

seeker

Sun, Sep 17 2017, 10:27 pm

My DD that age really likes when they are allowed to color if they finish early. Kids need to decompress sometimes. If they've worked hard and finished, why shouldn't they just have a break? I don't need the teacher to come up with an educational justification for every particular minute of school time.

Better still if they have a choice between coloring or free-reading.

amother

Teal

Sun, Sep 17 2017, 11:01 pm

seeker wrote:

[quote]

The thing is, those who are working hard, and don't finish early, also need time to decompress. As a teacher and a mom, I think there needs to be sensitivity to not reward kids with free time for being smart . The idea above about the station sounds good.

seeker

Sun, Sep 17 2017, 11:05 pm

[quote="amother"]

Quote:

The thing is, those who are working hard, and don't finish early, also need time to decompress. As a teacher and a mom, I think there needs to be sensitivity to not reward kids with free time for being smart . The idea above about the station sounds good.

Definitely; I was just replying to the comment about it being a waste of time or something like that.

For a child who consistently takes longer than most kids, I would usually shrink the assignment to its most basic. While there is often an advantage to more practice, for those kids who take a long time and end up getting stressed out about it, they only need to do enough to demonstrate that they know what to do.