Synopses & Reviews
For all K-6 teachers, here are nearly 200 exciting "quickie" classroom activities and reproducible worksheets to develop the thinking, reasoning, and memory skills of your elementary students and help them master both basic and advanced concepts in math, language, and writing.
Each activity or reproducible takes just 5 to 15 minutes and requires no prior preparation— all you need are simple materials such as paper and pencil or chalk and chalkboard. Simply open this valuable resource to find an appropriate activity in one of these four major skills and subject areas:
Thinking and reasoning
Students develop their thinking and problem-solving skills with 48 activities and worksheets that ask them to classify and categorize objects, make decisions for story characters faced with a dilemma, place events in logical sequence, create flowcharts, and find hidden analogies between words.
Math
Here you get 73 activities and worksheets such as "Magic 4," a mischievous math trick that gives students practice in addition, subtraction, and division. Other activities use games, memory challenges, and logic problems to teach such important concepts as estimation, decimals, computation, relationships and patterns, place value, odd/even coordinates and graphs, money, and geometry.
Language and writing
65 enjoyable word games, listening exercises, puzzles, add-on stories, and anagrams give students valuable practice in phonics, spelling, vocabulary, rhymes, compound words, and different parts of speech. For example, "Synonyms with Style" helps students stretch their vocabulary as they replace commonly used words with "stylish" synonyms.
Listening and remembering
Here you'll find 7 classroom activities that use body movement, mazes, and repetition to help students develop skills in critical listening, following oral directions, and memory. For example, "Can You Add to My Sentence?" involves students in creative thinking and memorization as they take turns adding words onto a phrase (after repeating everything that came before) until it becomes a long story.
Better still, you'll find the 82 full-page worksheets can be copied at a moment's notice for instant handout assignments. And to help you quickly select appropriate activities and worksheets for individual and group needs, a special Activity/Skills Index lists all of the activities and reproducibles by subject matter, group size, and grade level.
With Brain Teasers! Spare minutes become prime learning time. You'll turn to it every day to stimulate, reinforce, and expand the thinking skills of all your students!
Synopsis
Nearly 200 "quickie" classroom activities and reproducible worksheets to develop the thinking, reasoning and memory skills of elementary students and help them master both basic and advanced concepts in math, language and writing. Ideal ways to get kids involved, vary instruction, fill spare minutes, introduce or reinforce specific skills/concepts, and assign as homework.
About the Author
Susan S. Petreshene, M.A. (California State University, Sonoma), served as an elementary classroom teacher for over 20 years in the public schools of Concord and Novato, California. She authored many articles in professional journals such as Instructor and also wrote six practical books for teachers, including Mind Joggers! (The Center for Applied Research in Education) and Teaching Reading Skills: Visual Auditory and Kinesthetic Activities (Zaner-Bloser), co-authored with Walter B. Barbe, Ph.D.
Table of Contents
About this resource.
Suggestion for using these activities most effectively.
THINKING AND REASONING ACTIVITIES.
Total group activities
CLASSIFICATION.
Find my secret category.
Throw one away.
A type of.
Jobs depend on jobs.
Library search.
MAKING QUICK DECISIONS.
Domesticated/wild animals.
Person/place/object.
Land/water/both.
Male/female/either.
Cities/countries.
LOGIC-PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER.
How many answers can you find?
Here's the answer-what was the question?
Analogies.
Proverbs.
Flowcharts.
Who/what am I?
MINI STORIES FOR SOLUTION.
What-would-you-do? Stories.
My friends are calling a classmate names.
How come he's always bossing me around?
Decisions, decisions.
He's cheating!
INDIVIDUAL OR PARTNER ACTIVITIES.
Four in a row.
Squiggle imagination.
Two by two strategy.
What's the sequence?
Objects with body parts.
How could you use a ____?
Unsuspected similarities.
MATH ACTIVITIES.
Total group activities.
Relationships and patterns.
Number line jump.
Pattern detective.
Rhythm with numbers.
PLACE VALUE.
Hide and seek.
Little differences are not so little.
ODD/EVEN.
What's in between?
CALENDAR.
Calendar puzzles.
COORDINATES AND GRAPHS.
Graph favorites.
Coordinate ghost.
I'm hiding.
Directions from a clock!
MONEY.
What's the total value?
GEOMETRY.
Analyze the alphabet.
3-D inside/outside challenge.
GREATER THAN/LESS THAN.
Comparing numbers.
Ask and answer.
PROBLEM SOLVING.
Spokes of sums.
Numbers in hiding.
Sum search.
So, what's the number?
Target number.
Break my code.
ESTIMATION.
How many words per page?
COMPUTATION.
Code challenge.
Find my value.
Palindromes.
COMPUTATION MAGIC TRICKS.
Magic 4.
Pick another number.
Abracadabra.
More hocus.
We're stuck on 11.
The 280 trick.
Instant sums.
142,857 again?
INDIVIDUAL OR PARTNER ACTIVITIES.
Sum 15 tic-tac-toe.
Circle sum.
LANGUAGE AND WRITING ACTIVITIES.
Total group activities.
Compound words.
Find my compound words.
Can you hear me?
Spelling.
Shifting letters.
Spell my word.
Don't say that vowel!
SYNONYMS/ANTONYMS.
Tired old words.
Synonyms with style.
VOCABULARY.
Guess my word.
Context clues.
The word keeps changing!
Animal specific vocabulary.
WORD DERIVATION.
So that's my stem!
PARTS OF SPEECH.
Noun pairs.
Adverbs in action.
Find me a partner.
Tell me how.
Two-way words.
ADD-ON STORIES.
You add the ending.
Who are you?
The sailing adventure.
Bottle on the beach.
The old black book.
A surprise visitor.
Lost in the woods.
New school.
The untraveled country road.
Tale of the deep mine shaft.
Individual or partner activities.
Partner rhyme challenge.
Look alikes.
Word connections.
Double consonant daze.
Word category expansion.
Categories with one-letter restriction.
Front and back categories.
One-letter magic.
Tic-tac-toe spelling.
Growing word boxes.
Anagrams.
Word subtraction.
Scrambled sentences
LISTENING AND REMEMBERING ACTIVITIES.
Total group activities.
Following oral directions.
Can you follow my directions?
Close your eyes.
Put your hands on your knees.
Mystery sentence magic.
Letter maze.
Two box teaser
MEMORY.
Repeat these numbers.
Expanding sentences.
Can you add to my sentence?