I’m out of the classroom working with teachers and principals right now, but I still wake up occasionally in moderate panic in the middle of the night worried about a lesson finishing too soon, the class dissolves into chaos, and I’m fired. How weirdly that has seeped into my teacher bones.
Some educators and cognitive psychologists wisely advocate for students to experience down time and real boredom, to not be stimulated ceaselessly by screens or adult-led activities, to not be reminded of chores every moment they’re at home, and to find the quiet and imaginative places inside themselves or perhaps to have extended conversations with one another that meander without conclusion. There is value in this, so, yes, advocate for actual recess time and for students to take social media “vacations.” Build in screen-free, unstructured activities each week such as time to walk with a friend, parent, or grandparent, time to paint, fish, knit, color, sketch, dance, mess with Legos, play the guitar, or build a vegetable garden. And yeah, it’s cool to just sit in the dark and stare at the glow-in-the-dark stars Mom stuck on your bedroom ceiling.
We all know, however, that we have a short amount of time with students each day and year in which to teach an overloaded curriculum, and that learning time can be usurped by multiple and unforeseen interruptions in just one class period, let alone across the day or school year. Every classroom minute is dedicated to advancing learning’s cause, for there is so much to learn and not a moment to waste.
Add to this that a surprising number of middle and high school classes are only 35-, 45-, and 50-minutes long to fit in so many subjects per day. This leaves a significant chunk of instructional time spent on transitioning, with students settling their focus on each new subject after pinballing among three previous subjects in a row, each in a different hallway and with a different context. Functionally, a 50-minute class period means about 35 minutes of focused learning time, if we’re lucky. A 35- or 45-minute class, even less. On top of this, the curriculum seems to grow every year, as do the consequences for students who fail to learn it.
As always, there’s a balance in here somewhere, and we should seek it. Given our limited time with students, however, it’s instructionally reasonable to lean most often towards those things that we can do only when we have the school’s resources available are gathered in the presence of one another. Anything regarding learning that can be done on students’ own time without the presence of classmates and school resources (like the teacher!) is moved to homework or only occasional uses in each class period. An empty, last fifteen minutes of class time, then, is very rare. We want to be ready, though, for “found time,” opportunities, prepared with activities that support the course and related content, not simple babysitting until the bell rings.
At the end of the school year, too, we have this dilemma all over again when the required testing is done. We wonder how to keep students engaged in substantive learning during those last few weeks of school when what they do in class isn’t going to affect their final grades or “count” in some way.
‘Just a reminder here that having something “count” to a middle or high school student doesn’t mean it has to be graded by the teacher. That perspective comes from the world of transaction, coercion, and bribery, and is devoid of what we know about providing developmentally responsive instruction or how we help students cultivate motivation, self-discipline, executive function, and efficacy. We know that students will do activities and engage with material deeply if it’s relevant to their lives, they perceive they have the tools and capacity to do the work, it is validating and creates agency, and the learning is purposeful in some way.
Tips for Success
In this effort, here are eight tips for what to do in those time slots when lessons finish a bit – or a lot – early:
- Connect the activity or learning experience to your curriculum, not as an opportunity to escape from your curriculum (i.e. “Go to the gym and play basketball if you finish their summary paragraphs or math problems.”). At every turn, we want to promote our subjects as worthy of time, interest, and energy, rather than a trial to endure. If finding activities like this seems difficult at first, focus on areas tangentially connected to elements of your curriculum, such as collaborating with others on tasks, using content to solve puzzles, artistically capturing the spirit and intent of subject themes, working-world applications of topics and skills, thinking logically/critically in the subject area, and developing stamina with ideas, content, or processes.
- Choose activities and experiences during this time that require face to face interaction with classmates, not more screen time. Seriously, no matter how competitive and engaging the on-screen, trivia review game is this is not helping the adolescent cause.
- Leverage literature and resources on teaching in block-length classes. They often have two things of value here: First, they have great insight on how to use class time effectively, and second, they include descriptions of learning experiences we can facilitate in extended length classes that we don’t consider due to how short our classes are. For example, in a longer class period, we can break lectures and sections of learning into chunks and provide ample time and structure to properly process the content in working memory. We can use a few extra moments at the beginning of a lesson to create a sense of wonder and curiosity about the day’s topic. We can rotate students through learning stations with focused experiences in different sub-topics. We can provide time for students to work on passion and “capstone” projects in our disciplines. Whereas before these might have been instructional luxuries, they are now quite possible.
- Choose activities that require active engagement, not passive observation. One way to do this is to select experiences that create a product or demonstration of effort at the end of the allotted time period. Another is to have students work in partners or groups with each individual having a piece to contribute to the whole.
- To increase student engagement, choose activities and experiences that enable students to express and build authentic voice, making the subject, class, and school their own. Two ways to do this are to offer students learning experiences based on what you know lights them up personally and to let them choose how they want to proceed in the experience.
- Of course, a “found” 15 minutes or so of class is a great time to get a running start on tomorrow’s lesson by explaining directions for the next day’s game, providing interesting background for the content to come, introducing new vocabulary, building an analogy context for the new content, priming the mind for learning by showing photos or models of the content’s elements, or providing an interesting “hook” for tomorrow’s content. This means, though, that we have to plan our lessons in a series so we can pull up tomorrow’s lesson in today’s, suddenly free, classroom moment.
- An extra 10 to 15 minutes is a great time to review material from the previous week or so. Have a few retrieval practice activities or creative summarization techniques (ASCD’s Summarization in any Subject, Second Edition by this author and Dedra Stafford is a great resource) ready to go. Extra class time is great for extended practice encapsulating, critiquing, and applying content.
- If the class activity is fairly autonomous for students, consider this extra time as the perfect opportunity for teacher-student conferencing or for specific tutoring with individual students. We’re always saying there’s never enough time to do this, but wow, here we have it!
Building our Repertoire of Great Activities and Learning Experiences for that “Found” Time
Sometimes we need to jumpstart our thinking about the possibilities for substantive activities and learning experiences that we can provide during free segments in class. We can borrow ideas from others, too, and adjust them for our students’ needs and teaching situations. For that purpose, we have three categories of suggested activities and learning experiences teachers can facilitate, or portions of which they can facilitate, that are good uses of found, classroom time. These include suggestions related to specific subjects, communities, and the larger world, and activities that build divergent/critical thinking and academic stamina. Note that many of these activities are highly effective in the normal lesson itself, and shouldn’t be saved merely for the, “if we have time” waiting room.
- Samples of activities and learning experiences related to our individual subjects
- Samples of activities and learning experiences related to communities and the larger world
- Samples of activities and learning experiences that build divergent/critical thinking skills and academic stamina
Planning for the End of the Year
All this effort in using classroom time inevitably leads to thinking about the end of the year as well. Testing might be done in that last or second to the last month, and grades may or may not have been submitted, leaving a few weeks to go before the last day of school. Let’s use that time with something worthy of our students.
Here’s a sample of activities and learning experiences to facilitate after annual testing is done at the end of the school year that keep adolescents and young adolescents engaged creatively in substantive content and skills:
- If possible, connect each student with professionals in fields of interest and facilitate week-long, mini-internships in which students spend time each day with these professionals observing them in action and occasionally attempting some of the job-related tasks as appropriate. Also provide time and structure for reflection on the experience. The idea is for students to see themselves “adulting” and to help them create personal goals and the steps to achieve them. Yes, this can take some major logistics and permission slips to coordinate, but in many supportive communities, it’s possible.
- Ask students to paint a wall inside or outside the school that expresses elements in the curriculum.
- Provide opportunity for students to give speeches on important topics within the curriculum and invite parents and the local press. There are many groups that can help support this experience: The American Legion’s Oratorical Contest, speech and debate clubs, and Toastmasters.
- Take the whole class or team on a day-long hike.
- Ask students to write, produce, and star in a Shakespeare play, opera, or one act thereof that has been revised for a particular era or context, such as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as a tropical beach excursion, an 80’s punk band experience, spy movie, ancient Egypt, or as “newly discovered” chapter in the context of a popular young adult novel they’ve just read.
- Ask students to satirize something in the curriculum: Students study a few satires or parodies, even in MAD magazine, the Simpsons, Swift’s A Modest Proposal, along with more modern efforts, then they write, video, animate, or present their own satires of specific topics.
- Conduct a mini-[Subject] Olympics with intellectual-combined-with-physical tasks associated with your topic. For example, students can do 60-yard relay races running 20 yards to a collection of identified elements from the Periodic Table (each on a different card), pick the ones that in certain ratios make molecules of identified substances, then race 20 yards another direction to a collection of those substances (each on a different card), choose the correct one to match their chosen elements, then race 20 yards back to their starting position, releasing the next person of their six member relay team to rocket for the next combination. There is a myriad of activities to consider here that combine both movement and academics.
- Create movie posters for a fictional film related to the subject area with eye-catching graphics, titles, sound-bite reviews from movie critics, and a list of the cast and crew responsible for the film that can be displayed for next year’s students. When viewing the posters, we should see that students have creatively and accurately incorporated all the essential attributes of the identified topic. If it helps, these can be based on real movies, but the poster content describes specific elements students have learned. For example, a student might advertise a pretend movie, “Ferrous Bueller’s Day Off,” about how ferrous metals such as iron and steel took a day off, and oh, that dreaded team, Magneto and Oxidizer, are the villains hatching a plan for a full, Rust-pocalypse!
- Ask students to write, shoot, and edit a short video about a topic from the year.
- Create a video or slideshow of students’ experiences. This would require taking a lot of photos throughout the year, of course! Students are great documentarians, if you want to assign them this task.
- Conduct one of those great science contests like how to best drop an egg off the roof of a building without breaking it. You’ll find many middle school-appropriate examples online.
- Conduct a Poetry Festival or Poetry Slam – Check out Taylor Mali’s Website for inspiration. And hey, invite some adults in the building to participate. Multi-generational experiences like this are powerful for both students and staff.
- Create an escape room solved only through clues about your subject. Even better, ask groups of students to design the room themselves, then have a half-day-long, “Escape-apolooza,” in which groups try to escape other groups’ rooms by solving the planted clues.
- Connect with a local or national museum and conduct an electronic or in person interview with an expert in the field.
On some days of teaching, I experience time’s arrow granting entropy (careening toward disorder) in its full reign: Organized lessons spiral into chaos. How can I be of so many minds when it comes to students, their learning, and the timing of instruction all within the same second of a lesson? It’s comforting to have orderly lessons and with foresight, to allot the perfect amount of time for each segment, responding to the individual natures of all students. But learning, teaching, and humans are messy things, and our relationship with time is daunting, especially when having such significant impact on the future of the world by what we do in classrooms today.
It’s a bit absurd and presumptuous to think we can predict exactly how much time it takes for complex, unpredictable learning among diverse students to occur. With experience and a large, instructional repertoire, we get into a helpful “groove,” reading the room accurately and adjusting elements as needed. Even so, all teachers misjudge instructional time occasionally. In these moments, we are grateful for helpful options that further learning’s cause, ready to apply at a moment’s notice.
President John F. Kennedy once said that we should use time as a tool, not a couch. In our classrooms, we don’t lament, “Ugh, how shall I fill the time?” but instead, we ask, “Given these learning goals, how can I use classroom time effectively?” Let’s recognize that all of us, particularly educators, are defined by how we use our time. There’s no impatient finger tapping on the wristwatch or cellphone here, just the professional commitment to do right by our students and our communities: You know, to make the most of the time we have together, including time to sit with one another and simply stare at the stars.
SAMPLE ACTIVITIES
Here’s a sample of activities and learning experiences related to our individual subjects that work well for adolescents and young adolescents:
- Play Vocabulary, Math (or any subject) Rummy using index cards in which, in each turn, students draw one card from a pile of cards and discard one card back to that pile, just as we do in the card game Gin Rummy. Each card has a vocabulary term or number. As students pick up and discard cards, they are creating a five-card pattern that demonstrates a specific pattern we’ve designated for the round, such as all cards are synonyms for one another, factors of 36, parts of a plant, adverbs, steps of a scientific process, divisibility rules, or protections under the 1st Amendment. Once they have the identified pattern, they declare, “[Subject] Rummy!” and the other players have to confirm that what they have is correct.
- Write the autobiography of a [Insert inanimate concept or tool of your discipline], such as the autobiography of a cubed root, past perfect (pluperfect) tense, nuclear fusion, website, asymptote, or table/graph.
- Examine a common science, math, health, language, or history/government misconception and how it is perpetuated.
- “Turning Point in History” – Write or create fantasy/science fiction in which students explore how our lives would be different if certain historical events or scientific processes did not occur.
- Ask students to have fun punctuating weird sentences from famous literature, documents, or school handbooks. For example: “That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is” from Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon becomes, “That that is, is. That that is not, is not. Is that it? It is.”
- When teaching time/distance, bring in skateboards, scooters, Hot Wheels cars, etc., and conduct experiments in the parking lot (or on tabletops, if toy size).
- Explain how four different art concepts are expressed in a particular area of the school.
- Ask students to do “Body Statues” of topics: Small groups of students use every person’s body to sculpt a frozen tableau that symbolically portrays a concept or topic of study. The rest of the class identifies what’s being portrayed and critiques the group’s portrayal.
- Conduct a subject-themed scavenger hunt through the textbook or some other medium in order to familiarize students with the medium’s content and layout.
- Provide time to build another section of a subject-focused, pop-up book.
- Write a descriptive paragraph without using adjectives that uses one-syllable words only to describe its topic.
- Ask students to choose and defend one word, structure, or process to best symbolize or describe a topic.
- Ask students to spell vocabulary terms in such a way as to express their meaning, such as spelling “irony” with a surprise twist at the end, “treaty” with the individual letters coming together in settlement, or the letters of “slope,” rising over something running (rise-over-run).
- Conduct a competitive conversation integrating vocabulary terms purposefully and accurately in each sentence of a discussion. The first person to not further the conversation with an accurate use of a vocabulary word loses. To help, make sure to draw from a list of 10 or more currently studied vocabulary terms, and allow the use of vocabulary words from previous units of study when stuck.
- Draft a proposal to the city council for a bridge structure over a river or street, explaining why it is the sturdiest and most cost-efficient option.
- Prepare a report on the geometry of a basketball court.
- Design a lunar colony made only of three-dimensional solids, and ask students to include schematic designs of those shapes when laid out 2-dimensionally.
- Create a physical demonstration or expression of an abstract concept.
- Create a political cartoon informed by subject content.
- Create a comic strip or page of a graphic novel that retells a famous incident.
- Write and Pass – Students write a story about the given topic, but after every two sentences, they pass it to someone else to continue with his/her/their two sentences.
- In-Out Game: Students determine the classification a teacher’s statements exemplify, then they confirm their hypothesis by offering elements “in the club” and elements “out of the club.” They don’t identify the club, just the items in and out of it. If the students’ suggestions fit the pattern, the teacher invites them to be a part of the club. The game continues until everyone is a member. Example: “She is in the club but the class is not. They are in the club, but the penguins are not. You are in the club, but the donuts are not. Give me something in and out of the club.” A student guesses correctly that the club is for personal pronouns, so she says, “We are in the club, but moon rocks are not.” To make it a bit more complex, announce the club’s elements and non-elements in unusual ways that must also be exemplified by the students, such as making all the items in and out of the club alliterative or related in some way. This can be as obvious or as complex as you want it to be.
- Ask students to capture the day’s learning via the prompt, “I like, I wish, What if” (from Tina Seelig, inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity, HarperOne, p. 121).
- Ask students to complete jigsaw puzzles related to content, or even remotely related to content. There are multiple jigsaw puzzles available that depict the Periodic Table of Elements and maps of the United States, Europe, Central and South America, South Asia, Asia, Pacific Rim countries, and Africa. Here’s the thing, though: Ask students to complete these puzzles repeatedly, even inserting gentle competition by racing one another if needed, as this helps students remember where elements are in relation to one another.
Here’s a sample of activities and learning experiences related to communities and the larger world that work well for adolescents and young adolescents (Note that some of these work equally well as focused efforts at the end of the year after testing is done):
- Ask students to record books, newspapers, and magazines for younger students, homeless shelter residents, or elderly nursing home residents.
- Ask students to plan and build benches for the school’s courtyard or grounds.
- Ask students to write letters of hope, encouragement, and healing for hospital patients that will be placed on their food trays when delivered at meal times.
- Plan, make, and bury/install a time capsule of today’s culture and students’ predictions for the future.
- Ask students to draft and present a motivational speech or presentation. Alternatively, teach students the basics of extemporaneous speech and rotate students through short extemporaneous speeches on choice topics.
- Ask students to plan and video statements in poetic form that express informed, constructive contributions to discussions on community or societal issues. Though a young adult, David Bowden’s video, “The Inner Net,” is a good example of what middle and high school students can do. There are also many other examples online.
- Conduct one of the many activities offered by iCivics
- Take students outside the school building to engage with nature and a sense of place. To get ideas and facilitate these experiences, I recommend many of the experiences described in these books:
- Place-Based Learning: Connecting Inquiry, Community, and Culture by Micki Evans, Charity Marcella Moran, Erin Sanchez
- Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities by David Sobel
- Moving the Classroom Outdoors: Schoolyard-Enhanced Learning in Action by Herbert W. Broda
- Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv
- The Essential Guide to a Nature Rich Life: Vitamin N – 500 Ways to Enrich the Health and Happiness of your Family and Community by Richard Louv
Here’s a sample of activities and learning experiences that build divergent/critical thinking skills and academic stamina that work for adolescents and young adolescents:
- Write autobiographies to go with famous and not-so-famous portraits.
- Answer the question: “If a picture/sculpture could talk, what would it say?”
- Develop synthesis writings: “What does blue sound like?” “Describe red through other senses and experiences not associated with what we can see.”
- Respond: “If someone from the time period we’re studying were around today, what would they say about the modern world?”
- Build models from model-building kits.
- Prepare for participation in Odyssey of the Mind competitions.
- Do logic puzzles. There are dozens of great books for logic puzzle use in classrooms, but there are also wonderful websites dedicated to them, including https://logic.puzzlebaron.com/
- Play Chess and conduct a Chess tournament.
- Teach students to play the card game, “Bridge” – The American Contract Bridge League can help here.
- Conduct a paper airplane construction and flying contest.
- “Would you rather…?” (From Edutopia) Pair students up and have them discuss fun “would you rather” questions: “Would you rather live in a world with no technology or a world with no nature? Would you rather have the ability to speak with animals or the ability to speak all human languages fluently?” Additional recommended resource: Would You Rather? Family Challenge! Edition: Hilarious Scenarios & Crazy Competition for Kids, Teens, and Adults (2021) by Lindsey Daly.
- And from the same article, consider doing, “What is That?” – One teacher explains, “I showed a physics class a murmuration of starlings but did not tell them what it was.” Students had to figure it out. Find a picture of something your class would never encounter in your subject area. Display it for students to see, then ask students to work in partners using whatever resources we designate, but not cell phones or computers, to be the first to identify it.
- Teach and use theater games, similar to “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” – There are multiple websites and books dedicated to improvisational activities, such as Bob Bedore’s 101 Improv Games for Children and Adults (2004). When searching, use “Theater games,” and “Improv activities for middle school.”
- Students are given a yard of masking tape, a yard of thread, 25 sticks of uncooked spaghetti, and a marshmallow. Using all elements, students create the tallest free-standing structure. Winners get to be collectively “the teacher” for a day and teach the class a new topic within the unit of study.
- Ask students to write letters to themselves that you will send to them one year from now. Be sure to provide prompts to describe their thinking today as well as to make predictions about what they will be thinking and doing when the letter arrives. These can lean toward personal reflections or toward the subject being taught.
- Great, thought-provoking games for adolescents worth the “found” class time recommended by the Wormeli family and teacher colleagues: Azul, Catan, Tribond, Anomia, Splendor, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Set (The family game of visual perception), Ticket to Ride, Train of Thought (Referring to the one published by Tasty Minstrel Games by authors Jay Cormier and Sem-Foong Lim).
- Ask students to design and play each other’s Connections puzzles. These are similar to the New York Times popular Connections puzzles in which 16 words are displayed randomly across a 4 x 4 grid with one word in each square. Students work individually or in partners to figure out which four words at a time share a relationship. Once those words are connected, they are struck from the remaining choices, and play continues until all four, 4-word connections are made. Relationships can be anything students would know regarding a subject or previous subject, but they can require divergent thinking too. For example, they could all four be amino acids, or a different set of four items can be elements that when combined are super reactive. They can all be vocabulary terms that happen to be homophones for other words, such as cite, bear, waist, and whether. They can all refer to a historical figure, synonyms, parts of an algorithm, multiples of both 2 and 3 (when using numbers instead of words), historical sequence of innovations, countries that are adjacent, or words that connect with a particular word, such as rock: igneous, ‘n’roll, ‘the cradle, ‘of Gibraltar. Remember, the fun and engagement here is that students make these grids, not us, and then they solve (make the four categories of connections) in each other’s puzzles!
- Handcuffs Puzzles! Each student has a piece of rope with a loop tied at both ends. The rope should be reasonably long, so that the person wearing it attached to both wrists can step over it if they want. Students place their hands through the loops, wearing them as if they were handcuffed in front of them. Place students with partners, and one partner removes one “handcuff” and loops it around his partner’s rope, then reinserts his hand into his open loop, making these two individuals connected together by their ropes. They now have to get themselves apart.
Rick Wormeli is a long-time teacher, consultant and author living in Herndon, Virginia. His book, The Collected Writings (So Far) of Rick Wormeli: Crazy, Good Stuff I Learned about Teaching Along the Way, is available from www.amle.org/store. His newest books are Fair Isn’t Always Equal: Second Edition, and Summarization in any Subject: 60 Innovative, Tech-Infused Strategies for Deeper Student Learning, 2nd edition, co-authored with Dedra Stafford. He can be reached at rick@rickwormeli.onmicrosoft.com, @rickwormeli2 (X), @rickwormeli.bsky.social (Bluesky), and at www.rickwormeli.com.