It's so easy to just give students free time on their devices, but today I'm sharing some simple tweaks that can help you make the most of those miscellaneous pockets of free time. Adding enrichment time to your classroom might be more simple than you think!
Episode Highlights
What is enrichment time?
5 steps to adding enrichment time to your classroom routines
Smart and Simple Social Studies Membership Waitlist
Take Social Studies off the back burner with time-saving, easy-to-prep, and engaging resources at your fingertips!
Be the first to know when the Smart and Simple Social Studies Membership opens this summer!
Easy-to-follow lesson plans and activities for social studies - just print and teach! The growing bundle for Communities, Texas History, and U.S. History is now available. Click the link to learn more!
This is the social studies teacher podcast, a show for busy elementary teachers looking for fun and engaging ways to easily add social studies into their classroom schedule without feeling overwhelmed or pressed for time. I'm curious to know the southern teach an educator and mom who is passionate about all things, social studies, I love sharing ideas and strategies that are low prep and easy to implement. So let's dive in together.
Do you find yourself with some extra time in class during the day or week, and you're not sure what to do with your students, you might resort to having them sit around the room and playing on their devices, then the behavior tends to start increasing in the wrong direction. And maybe you want to put a twist on study hall time and make it more engaging for your students. So if you are thinking about these questions, enrichment time might be the perfect solution to all the above. And I can't wait to explain this in this episode. Alright, so in this episode, we're going to talk about what enrichment time is, how to start enrichment time with your students and five steps to do so. Super short and sweet episode. I think it's really fun. And I encourage you to try this out.
to:
Alright, so step number one is to determine how often and when your students will have enrichment time, decide if you've got an extra chunk of time where students could be doing something but aren't really kind of you have, it's just extra fluff time. And for me, students in my class had 45 minutes daily of enrichment time. So you can do between 30 minutes to a whole hour.
Step number two is to make a menu of activities each month, depending on the subject that you teach, make it applicable to what your students are learning in your classroom, or what they have already learned. I feel like it's a lot easier to just reinforce what they've been learning and kind of do it as like a spiral review type of thing where, by this point in time, if you're listening to this in real time, they've already learned a lot of the concepts and standards that you're supposed to be teaching in social studies or ELA. And really what you can do is kind of have maybe some activities that you didn't August and September are concepts taught in August and September, and just kind of recycle it in and just come up with something new and different, maybe some type of map skills activity or regions of the United States activity. And just kind of relating to that. This is something that I did when I was self contained. So all subjects we had social studies science, math, reading, and ELA. And so I did all of the above I'll talk a little bit more about like the actual activities, but some examples I had was a response menu, where they're reading a fiction book of their choice in their book bag or from the library or online using epic, and they had to answer three reading menu questions in the reader first notebook. Another option they had was going on to education galaxy, but you can always have them go on to any type of application that might be included in your district. There was one where they're going to BrainPOP Jr. And this was more kind of like a social studies activity, they were watching a specific video. And this specific one was for local and state governments. And then they're working on the assigned activities that were in the application. One of them was going into my own news, they had to pick an article and fill out on my on a news report that I created. One was a matter poster. So they're creating a poster teaching others about solids, liquids, and gases. And then roll a story. This was just a quick like, roll the dice four times and write a funny story in their writers notebook. So you can kind of tell I taught all subjects for this particular one, there were six activities on the menu. And I only changed it every month. So a lot of the activities were varied each month. And it really didn't take them a lot of time to do some of them. And I would rotate them out. So the reading response menu, they didn't have to answer the same three, reading menu questions, there would always be other ones that they could answer on another day. So it varied, the different activities varied. And the different menu items varied. And of course, there was the different books that they could read on Epic and the different activities they could do on education galaxy. And so it made it really easy to swap out certain activities, but also keeping it very consistent.
Step number three, make it independent students should be able to complete the activities independently, when or if they are not meeting with you. So this is why I really think it should be a review of concepts that they've already learned. Because it's a lot more easier to be independent, more than likely, they're going to understand the content. And they're just kind of doing some type of extension activity to go along with the content that they've already learned. And this can be really great, you can do something, I mean, there's all kinds of things you can do, you can do something related to a holiday, or a cultural celebration, or government, the three branches of government, there's a lot of different ways you can go about making it really independent and giving them that autonomy.
Step number four incorporate must do and may do activities. So this was also key, provide students with activities that students must complete first before they move on to an option of their choice, because we know that student choice is key. But at the same time, we don't want them to be on one menu item the whole time, all year. I think a lot of the students if they had their choice, they would be on Epic the whole time or education galaxy the whole time. And, of course, in order to alleviate that, at one point, we did prioritize, okay, we're going I want you to make sure you complete these three items before you get on another item, or focus on two for the you know, for the day, and you get to pick which two but then the next day, we're going to pick another two from the menu that you did not do already. You can even have some type of menu tracker where they're tracking which activities they've already been to, and how you know, if you don't want them to repeat it in a certain amount of time, or repeat for the no repeats for the week. If you want to do something like that, that's always a great way to kind of give them the choice without having them just go on the laptop the whole time and go to the same app, just giving them that ability to travel around and do all of the different activities on the menu that you have.
The last step is to utilize a tracker, try to encourage your students to complete all activities on the menu for the month. And this was also mentioned previously in the last step. And you can also make some menu activities as a grade. So that's a great way to encourage students to make sure they're doing the activities is to assign one or two or three of them as a grade where they have to complete it. And it is scored once students have had time to utilize the menu with minimal assistance. This is also a great time to pull students in for extra intervention or extra extension groups, reading groups, small groups. If you want to add that in after you feel like they are able to do these independently and they know what to expect.
The best part about enrichment time is that it's flexible and it can be tailored to what best works for You and your students, you should definitely give enrichment time a try. And let me know if you try some variation for it. Now, if you go to my blog, and you go to this description of this episode, you can actually grab my enrichment time template and menu ideas for free. Now, this is just for one month that I have, but it's the actual template that I have of what I utilized. And it happens to be the month of October, but you would have to change it out to march or whenever you're listening to this. But you can still use these ideas here that I have in the examples I mentioned. And you can change it up and change up the clipart. It's all editable. It's just a quick template that I created through Google Slides. So it's super easy to utilize. Hopefully this episode was useful to you and you try enrichment time, or you save it in your back pocket for the next school year. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week.
Thanks for listening to the social studies teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can also find me on Instagram at the southern teach. I can't wait for you to join me in the next episode. For more teacher tips and strategies
