As the year was coming to a close a couple weeks ago, I was trying to think of some epic way to wrap everything up and recap the highlights from the entire year. I thought about doing a review Kahoot! or some sort of challenge activity. In years past I’ve had the scholars create board games reflecting on the year. Those would be fun, but then I had a better idea…an epic reverse quest!
My scholars spend the entire school year on a journey battling my evil twin, the dreaded Dr. Vonn Stock, my evil twin (he wears a pirate eye-patch so you know he’s evil). On their journey they face some of his minions like Cyther and Zak the yaks and try to rescue some of the other Agents helping them on their journey (the Special Agents also look mysteriously like me). Through this structure we travel to the different realms of the texts we read, from Mt. Everest in Peak by Roland Smith to a WWII battle in various WWII texts.
To wrap up the year we spent the last week of school going on a sped up reverse quest through the various novels and time periods we studied in class. Each unit was covered in some sort of challenge activity that the table guilds had to tackle. It was epic.
To start off we reviewed their WWII novels with a Grid Challenge. I can’t take credit it for this. It was one of the many great ideas to come out of the weekly #xplap Twitter chats. The guilds spent 10 minutes trying to complete a grid by filling in terms the started with the letter at the top and connected to the category on the left. For example: P- and Countries could include Poland because it was involved in WWII. They had some very creative answers and recalled a wide range of topics we had discussed during the most recent unit.
For more details check out a full explanation of the grid challenge here
The next day’s challenge was to write an entire reflection on the best poem from our Poetry Smackdown bracket. This one wasn’t as game based as I would have liked, but having a time limit (60 minutes) to brainstorm, outline, write and revise and entire essay was a great challenge. I’ve found this year that the students provide almost the same quality of work with limited time, than when I give them multiple days to complete a task. Before we began we had a socratic circle over the poems, and some of the discussions were amazingly heated.
Day 3 of the reverse quest took part in the Civil Rights movement. The students completed Civil Rights Movement dominoes. They spent another 15-20 minutes attempting to link a series of paper dominoes with terms and pictures on them. Some were directly from our studies of the Civil Rights Movement, others were random challenge words they had to try to find a way to connect..For example, some students connected “Civil Rights Movement” to “Turtles” because it was slow moving. Then they connected “turtles” to “Mother Pollard” because she probably walked slowly past the bus stops. I was impressed with their creativity.
For more details check out a full explanation of the Learning Dominoes activity here
We also battled the dreaded Zak the Yak. Their challenge was for each guild to write a story about defeating Zak using all of the prefixes and suffixes we’ve learned this year. Two teams earned a bonus for the next day, because they befriended Zak instead of destroying him. Those groups got help from Zak in the next days battle (this rule was made up when I heard their amazing stories and unique definition of “defeating” him).
Day 4 was the last day of our reverse quest so of course they had to face…Dr. Vonn Stock. But it couldn’t begin with any old battle. Instead I started the class in the usual manner. I had them read a book and then when everyone was settled I played the daily announcements video. A minute into the video the screen went to static, and I broke in with an announcement that I had been captured and the person in front of them was an imposter. It was super cheesy so of course the scholars loved it. While they were watching the video I pulled my eye patch out of my pocket and casually put it on. When the video was over I laughed and told them that it was true…Dr. Vonn Stock had taken over.
I explained that in order to defeat me they would have to complete a fierce Kahoot! Battle. Of course the questions had some evil twists. For example one question said to choose a box…only 3 of them were right. Another one asked them to describe Mr. Stock and since it was Dr. Vonn Stock’s Kahoot!, all of the answers about Mr. Stock having stinky feet and being a mean brother were the correct answers. The groups from the day before who found a peaceful way to defeat Zak the Yak were able to enlist his help on one question. This required every other team to wait at the front of the room for the first 5 seconds of a question. In one instance it was a game changer.
We all had a blast with this activity. While they were competing I would casually switch the eye patch to different eyes to see which groups would notice, or I would complain about how mean Mr. Stock was. Finally at the end to the hour the winning groups were awarded bonuses for their guilds. Dr. Vonn Stock also recruited some students to his evil mission.
All-in-all it was an epic way to wrap up their learning for the year.
