If you want to keep the fun in your teaching day, introduce your students to learning with RIDDLES!
I’m a big fan of making learning fun, because when kids are having fun, they want…
1. Using riddles as a listening activity encourages the development of extended attention. You’ve got to keep listening to get all the clues!
2. Riddles help develop your students’ listening skills, like attention to detail and focusing on the speaker. What a great social skill to have – listen all the way to the end of what your friend is saying,
3. Using riddles is an amazingly effective way to teach using key details, making inferences, and drawing conclusions, all of which are critical skills no matter how you label them, whether you’re a Common Core district or not! After you solve the riddle, go back and ask that all important question – “How did you know?” – and then gradually start to insert some of the comprehension-specific language mentioned above into your discussions of the solution.
5. Vocabulary! Once new words have been introduced and your kiddos have had a variety of experiences to help the words and their meaning sink in, use riddles as a great review tool. There’s no limit to vocabulary learning with riddles!
1. Riddles are great as a quick supplement to your calendar time. A riddle can be solved in under a minute – that’s a lot of learning value for just a teensy snippet of time!
2. Solve riddles as a daily whole group activity when teaching social studies (or math, science,… whatever is relevant to the topic. of the riddles). They are a great way to get everyone quiet and focused!
4. Work on listening skills by solving without seeing the printed riddle text. Can your students solve the riddles without seeing the words? That’s a whole different skill set than #3!
7. Riddles are a quick and engaging literacy center activity. You might choose to have your students just number a paper and write the answers to the riddles. Or you could shake it up a bit by turning a set of riddle cards into a Read the Room activity. Speaking of “shake it up”, how about putting the answers on little cardstock scraps and sticking them into a shake-a-bottle?
8. A riddle card on your interactive board is a no-prep Do Now when your students arrive in the morning, or when they return to the classroom after recess.
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