As an upper elementary teacher, you are always looking for new and innovative ways to engage your students in learning. One tool that is often overlooked is the daily language review worksheet. Check out my favorite language reviews for 3rd grade or 4th grade!
These worksheets can be a great resource for reinforcing essential language skills. However, you can go beyond the traditional approach and incorporate the language reviews in centers or stations, using them as bell ringers or morning work, using them as task cards, turning the questions into games, and utilizing them in interactive notebooks. Let’s take a look!
Incorporate Daily Language Review Worksheets into Centers/Stations
One way to make daily language review more engaging is to incorporate it into your centers or stations. Create a language arts center where students can work independently or with a partner to complete daily language review worksheets.
Kick Off the Day with Bell Ringers
Bell ringers are a great way to get your students focused and ready to learn at the start of the day. Why not use a daily language review worksheet as your bell ringer? It’s a quick and easy way to reinforce concepts from previous lessons and prepare your students for the day’s activities. By using language review worksheets as bell ringers or morning work, your students can wake up their brains while also reviewing important grammar and vocabulary skills they’ve learned. This will also help your students start their day off with a sense of accomplishment and purpose.
Whole Class Instruction
Print a copy of the paper language review for everyone, plus one to put under your document camera. Lead your students through a lesson as you discuss and model each language skill. To make it digital, display your slide for the day on your smart board and let students come to the front to write in their answers or move the interactive pieces if you’re using digital language reviews.
Turn Daily Langauge Reviews into Task Cards
Since daily language reviews usually only have a few questions they can be completed fairly quickly. That makes them perfect for use as task cards that can be used in a variety of ways from write-the-room activities to cooperative learning activities. You can also turn your daily language review pages into task cards and use them in a center, game, or as a formative assessment.
Turn Daily Lanague Review into a Game
Who doesn’t love playing games? You can even turn the questions from the daily language review worksheets into a game without creating any extra work for you! It’s as simple as assigning a point value for each question at the end of your daily language review time.
Once you’ve reviewed the answers roll a dice to determine the points that students could earn for each correct answer. I like to use a tens dice just to make the points add up faster. For added excitement, randomly choose one question that earns a roll from the hundreds dice! This not only makes learning more fun for your students, but it also helps to engage their competitive nature and incorporates a little mental math warm-up as well.
Use Daily Langauge Reviews in Interactive Notebooks
To mix your routines up a little have students glue a daily language review page into their interactive notebook on one page and and then fill the corresponding page with notes and ideas that are related to the questions on the daily language review. This idea is a great way to add a little novelty to a worksheet in order to keep language practice fresh and exciting for students.
There you have it! A little outside the box thinking can turn a plain worksheet into something with a little spark of excitement. Sometimes shaking up the routine is all you need to get your students engaged and excited to learn again! Try out a few of these ideas for yourself with these free samples.
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