Using a Beach Ball for Review Questions

August 16th, 2010 By: Diane Trim in Articles, Teachers' Corner

Whenever the seasons change, I start to get really excited. There are few things I love more than a good end-of-season clearance rack. One of the items you can depend on finding at half price this time of year is the beach ball. I can usually pick one up for about a dollar, but I’ve seen them in August for 50 cents or less. I buy a good half dozen when I can find them on sale.

Beach balls are wonderful things. You can blow them up and, deflated, they store flat. If you puncture a beach ball, a small bit of duct tape will allow you to continue to use the ball, at least for a time. You can also repair them with vinyl repair kits (be careful not to stick two layers of the ball together).

Why all this talk about beach balls? They make for a wonderful review game and a great change of pace. Pull out the beach ball, start blowing it up and you’ll have a class full of engaged students.

Prepare the beach ball. Inflate the beach ball at home or during your planning period. Orient the ball with the small circles where the North and South Poles would be on a globe. Using a black permanent marker, draw an equator around the middle of your globe/beach ball.

Develop questions. In my beach ball’s Northern Hemisphere, I use the permanent marker to write question verbs from Bloom’s Taxonomy. In the Southern Hemisphere, I write words from our unit.

The game. Students bat the ball around and the third person to receive the ball must catch it with two hands. One hand will be the top hemisphere’s question and the other will be the word from the unit. You can change it up, of course, and have each person answer questions. You’ll need to figure out what to do about beach ball spikes and players who go to great lengths to avoid the beach ball. That can be part of your pre-game discussion.

Sample questions:
Generic literature (story map)

Northern Hemisphere: Summarize, List, Defend, Condemn, Describe, Identify
Southern Hemisphere: Theme, character, climax, resolution, conflict, setting

Of course, you can adapt this idea to almost any unit of study or any discipline. Math teachers can do an order of operations beach ball, Science teachers can review genetics. The balls are cheap enough that you could create a review for each unit of study or even have two balls in the air at once. Students could answer the questions as partners, from opposite sides of the room.

Have you used the beach ball review in your class? What might be some questions for the Northern and Southern hemispheres of the ball? What other review games have you used in your classroom?

Photo credits:
Beach balls floating on the pond before the Slush Cup: Alaskan Dude / Frank Kovalchek on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Beach Ball: KaCey97007 / Cindy Mc on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Liquid Heaven – With a ball: bratha / Andrew Braithwaite on Flickr.com Creative Commons

Tags: Bloom's Taxonomy, game, review