Learning with Riddles for Vocabulary and Math

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…

more,

MORE!

… and what teacher would ever argue with a request for more learning? When your students are having fun while they learn { I’m talking about the … umm.. “controlled” variety of fun, not the Halloween-on-a-Monday or running-around-screaming kinds of fun, noisy is fine, but no thank you to craziness 😉 }, their brains are actively engaged and they’re learning more.

Besides, when they’re having fun, I’ll bet that teaching is also more fun for you!

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.

4. Riddles encourage the use of mental images, a vital comprehension skill. Try solving a riddle without building some kind of mental image or even a graphic organizer in your mind, and changing it as new clues are added! We do this as adults without thinking about it, but solving riddles together is one great way to model for your students the act and the language of how to develop and use mental images.

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!

6. Solving riddles encourages the use of connections, a comprehension skill we all try so hard to develop in our students. Connecting the clues with schema and prior knowledge is a skill that takes intentional practice, and lots of it! As you talk through the thinking process with your little learners, those skills will grow! When you’re working together to solve a riddle, it’s a great time to ask the questions like, “What’s your schema? How can what you already know help you figure this out?”

7. Riddles are incredibly engaging! Everyone wants to play along, everyone wants to guess, and to make a reasonable guess, you’ve got to …LISTEN and THINK!

Your days are BUSY! Here are some ideas for fitting in 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!

3. Use a riddle card on your interactive board to develop reading comprehension skills like those listed above. Call on students to identify and mark on the screen key words that helped them arrive at the solution.

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!

5. Here’s a cool idea that I recently received in a customer comment – use riddle cards for a quick and easy bulletin board display! A principal I once worked for required all hallway bulletin boards to be instructional and interactive. It was a bit challenging to create these at first, but once we all got into the swing of it – wow! You could always stop for a quick learning tidbit whenever you were walking your class anywhere in the school!

6. Put a set of riddle cards in your sub tub, teamed with a themed read-aloud and a writing activity. {Most of the vocabulary riddle sets in my TpT store include a template for your students to write their own riddles.}

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.

9. Early finishers love solving riddles! Print, cut, laminate, and put on a ring – a great alternative to extra worksheets!

Well, of course! 🙂

I’ve created soooo many kinds of riddles for learning that I’d like to offer you a few choices.

First, with autumn on the way (seriously? already???), click here for a free set of Autumn Vocabulary Riddles.

And now for some math!

Kindergarten teachers, this one’s for you! Teaching Tip: Try solving a math riddle together as the basis for a daily number talk! Click here to download!