Many of my 4th graders embarked on the “Presentation Planning” stage of their Genius Hour projects this week. I require their presentations include an interactive portion for the audience. When they saw “game show” as one of the choices, that became an instant favorite. The problem with this is that the default game show format for my students always seems to be “Jeopardy.” There is nothing wrong with Jeopardy, but I’ve been guiding Genius Hour projects for several years, and would like to see a little more variety in this area.
Thankfully, I obsessively save websites to look at later with my Pocket app, and recalled there was a blog post about game shows. Although the post was written with teachers in mind as the hosts, many of the suggestions in “30 Activities Inspired by Game Shows” are ones that could be used by students.
Another possibility would be to encourage the students to create their own game show format. You never know who in your class might be the next Merv Griffin!
