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In the U.S., most students have a holiday break at the end of December and return to school sometime in early January. With the long month of January ahead, many teachers and students struggle to chase away those January blues!
The past few years have been unprecedented in their challenges for students and teachers, so a little laughter, fun, and novelty is definitely in order!
Here are a few ideas that will enliven and engage students and get your year off to a great start:
JANUARY GAMES, PUZZLES, and a SCAVENGER HUNT
2024 MAD GABS ~ Just a quick game you can do first thing as a warm-up in January. If you’ve played the game MAD GAB®, you know how it works. Read what you see on a game card – very quickly several times – until it makes sense as a sentence. “Wheel Yum Air Ream He” becomes “Will You Marry Me?” Once you’ve played, you can challenge students to create their own!
NEW YEAR TRADITIONS LOGIC PUZZLE. This free logic puzzle is of medium difficulty. If your students need help, this video tutorial explains how to solve it, step-by-step.
NEW YEAR’S PROGRESSIVE PUZZLE (TPT -$2.00) A progressive puzzle is 4 puzzles in 1. Each puzzle solution is needed to solve the next one. Some teachers use this as a warm-up activity each day of the first week since it takes students a while to solve.
DASHING THROUGH THE SNOW is a fun and educational virtual scavenger hunt, a perfect activity for the first week back. After hunting for clues via Google Earth, students solve a cryptogram puzzle to find a “treasure in the snow.”
LEARN A CALENDAR TRICK ~ EXPLAIN THE MATH – Perform these calendar tricks and then challenge your students to figure out how you are doing them! Then have them explore calendar patterns and create their own tricks.
JANUARY DATES and SPECIAL DAYS
“TIME and DATE” PATTERNS AND CALENDAR PUZZLES~ Could be one lesson or last all year. The activities presented begin with “a riddle within a puzzle,” include video lessons, and reinforce all kinds of math and patterns.
NATIONAL OPPOSITE DAY is January 25th and includes challenging and engaging activities for celebrating including palindromes, poetry, irony, backwards ranking, and math patterns.
FIBONACCI DAY this year landed during Thanksgiving break, but January 12th could serve as an alternate day (0-1-1-2) to celebrate with students. Find more HERE.
Check out the Holiday/ Seasonal Ideas for January to find additional special date activities.
BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND
We work so hard creating lessons, units, and finding resources. What if you and your students spent a few minutes in early January brainstorming ideas for projects to share with others at the end of the year? Pose the question below and give students time to think independently first and then with a partner. Have them jot down their best ideas and collect these. If nothing else, you get a feel for your students’ interests and preferences, and you can do whatever you’d like with them!
What could we begin working on now that might be fun to share with others at the END of the year?
Your students may already be working on independent projects if you have a specific time devoted to that (e.g. Genius Hour). But could students cook up some ideas for a culmination of their studies? Perhaps an event with a theme that brings unity to what they will be sharing?
Here are a few things my students came up with (or inspired):
- library displays (models, displays, mini-posters with interactive features such as the QR codes shown in the photo here)
- create game questions related to studies that can be collected throughout the semester and used in an end-of-the-year game
- work toward an end-of-year Open House for parents planned and hosted by students
- create an event to host for a grade level (my students have created and hosted “Mystery Day” and a “Think-A-Thon” for their grade levels.)
- create a museum, either self-guided or with students as tour guides (this can be as simple as setting out projects completed or having students share experiments and demonstrations; if you’re feeling bold, you might embark on creating something like this DoSeum my fifth graders created)
Challenge students to really “think outside the box!” Your students will never work as hard as they do when they feel ownership in planning!
UNCOMMON GOALS ~ A CLASS EXPERIMENT
Goal-setting is one of the most common activities worldwide at this time of year. The readings linked below are not intended to be shared with students, but all relate to doing one small thing each day, and this idea can put a twist on discussing goals and put the focus on social-emotional health.
- 365 Thank-You Notes
- 365 Random Acts of Kindness
- 365 Sentences – Journal One a Day (Note: *2024 has 366 days!)
Ask students what comes to mind when they hear the phrase “New Year’s Resolutions” and discuss common resolutions made. Ask students, “If you made a goal to do one small thing a day that would have a positive impact, what comes to mind?” Students may not want to share aloud, so just ask them to consider if their idea would have a positive impact on them personally or on someone else. Share a little information from the readings above, and explain that each “experiment” resulted in a positive impact not only on the people doing one small thing each day but also on those around them. Why? (Possible responses: showing gratitude and being kind benefits health and puts smiles on faces // writing a sentence a day motivates the writer to want to “have something good” to document, so perhaps more thought is given to daily choices and treatment of others). If you think it’s appropriate, share “The Science of Happiness” video. Ask students if any would like to share in a class experiment of this sort! Students could choose one small thing to do each day (for a week? for a month?) and then reflect and share about what happened. Help students make connections to real-world studies of this kind.
A GIFT TO THE CLASS
If you have some money in your school or personal budget, tell the class that you are going to purchase something new for the classroom as a gift to everyone. I sometimes did this in December as a holiday gift rather than purchasing individual gifts for students, which was out of my budget since I had between 75 and 110 students! Take suggestions from the class and then ask them to help you create a list of criteria that will assist in making a decision. This is evaluative thinking and students benefit from practicing this kind of decision-making!
Do you have any special New Year activities that help set the tone for the spring semester? Consider sharing them with us by leaving a comment below. If you are new here, join our Facebook group where we share all about planning for gifted students.
We are working virtually and my students LOVED the Mad Gabs. I set up a friendly competition in my small groups to see which group could figure out what the Mad Gab phrase was. We combined these with reflections on our years. Thank you Donna!!
I love hearing how you incorporate activities into your own plans. I had a lot of fun writing those and I really think kids would, too! Let me know if they write any of their own!