End of the Year Game Shows and Activities

Sometimes the anticipation of summer is too much for the students to handle and they get a little antsy. A fun way to end the school year, is to play popular game shows in your classroom. You can have the students write the questions to include in the game show.

During our last two weeks of school my class and I will play game shows to review concepts that we have learned this year. To prepare for this, I had my fifth grade students browse through all of their notes from the entire school year. Each student had to come up with three questions and answers to use in our game shows. I gave each student three 3 by 5 inch cards to write their questions on.

Once you have the questions for your game shows, you can begin plugging the questions into a template. There are many websites that have templates already created for you.Jeopardylabs.com is one of my favorite FREE sites to use when I create Jeopardy games. I like that it is not a PowerPoint presentation. It is stored on-line. All you need to access it is the url. This url is created when you make your game. Also, if you do not wish to create your own games, you can search on their site through thousands of games created by other users.


PointsforTeachers.com is a site that has a few PowerPoint templates available for you to customize. They also include theme music to go along with their games.
One of their templates is an Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? game. I especially love this template because I am teaching fifth grade this year. However, I do think that any grade level of students would love to play this game.
The Murray School District in Georgia has several pages of their website dedicated to technology. Among their pages is a page by Ms Leonard. On her page, she has links to game show templates, complete with music. Some of the games on her site include; Wheel of Fortune, which you could play with spelling words; Who Wants to be a Millionaire; and Family Feud.

Algebra Puzzles

Math Playground has a fun activity that will help increase algebraic thinking. In this online activity, each picture represents a number. The goal is to discover, through numeric reasoning, which numbers represent each picture. The students will have a great time solving these puzzles and learning in the process. After they have been successful solving the puzzles on their own, you can have them create their own puzzles for others to solve.