The world isn’t normal right now. (Well, to be fair, it’s usually not “normal,” especially for those of us whose jobs involve kids.) But right now, most of us are stuck at home, and your spring quizbowl season is probably on hold if not completely cancelled at this point. So, what do we do when the “new normal” means no matches, no practices, no tournaments, for the foreseeable future?
If your students are able to access the Internet at home, this can be a great time to encourage students to do some individual study, which they can then share with their teammates. Think of it like mini-lessons on topics of interest for your team. While your quizbowlers are stuck at home, encourage them to choose one new topic each day and learn about it. Or you can assign a topic. Maybe you have some notes of answers you think your team needs to know, or they’ve been keeping their own logs.
They can select an artwork, a country, a president, a novel, etc., and do some research on it using the Web. If I were coaching a team right now, I’d encourage each team member to create a slide show – no more than 5 or 6 slides long – in a shared Google Drive. That way, the rest of the team can view the information that their teammate collected. And they can categorize them in the Google Drive folder by topic. These could be great resources later on for a quick review or practice. If your team has 10 kids, and they’re at home for 15 days each, you could have nearly 150 topics locked down!
You might extend this lesson by having each student write a draft question using the clues that they found, encouraging them to think about which clues are the hardest and which are the easiest so they build the correct clue pyramid. These questions don’t have to be perfect, but they can be a great way to get your students’ minds in the headspace of a question writer. This can help them be able to process clues faster when they hear them and understand the “logic” of a well-written question.
Do you have other ideas for some asynchronous practice activities that your students can do from home? Feel free to comment here or email us to share!
Stay well,
Alex
SAGES Quizbowl Questions 