15 Easy Ways to Engage Fast Finishers (So They’re Still Learning!) [episode 53]

You are listening to episode number 53 of wife teacher mommy the podcast 15 easy ways to engage fast finishers so they’re still learning wondering what to do with your early finishers. It can be overwhelming when you have some kids who need more and other kids who need more time but others who are done and bored and causing chaos. So I’ve got 15 easy ideas that you can implement right away that could keep all your kids learning.

I’m so glad you’re here listening to wife teacher mommy the podcast today. I’m your host Kelsey Sorenson, a former elementary teacher turned home school mom. Whether you are a teacher or a homeschool parent, my goal at wife teacher mommy is to provide you with both teaching ideas and mindset tools. To help you live your absolute best teacher life. Be sure to hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss an episode. Now let’s go

Can you believe that it is almost the end of 2022 We’ve got like one day left as of when this episode drops crazytown. And if you didn’t already, be sure to listen to last week’s episode, if you’re thinking about goals for the new year. Last week’s episode was my favorite episode I’ve ever recorded yet, so be sure to check it out. And then also, I wanted to remind you that since it is December 30th, our giveaway for our 50 episodes celebration ends on Sunday the first so we’ll be picking a winner on the second and I’ll be announcing it on a bonus listener favorite. It’ll air either Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on how quickly our team can get it up after the holiday weekend. So I hope that you’ve had great holidays. And I’m excited to dive into all of this. I wanted to remind you also that that prize if you’re like Wait, what is she talking about? If you didn’t hear previous episodes, somebody who leaves a review on the podcast will win three things actually. So the first is a custom stainless steel tumbler. So we mail one of these tumblers to every member when they join us as an annual wife, teacher, mommy club member or if they’re a current member, and they switch their membership to annual and it has actually got mine right here. It’s my one of my favorite tumblers, it just keeps your drink ice cold, and it has our logo on one side and progress over perfection on the other. But the winner of this giveaway is going to get a custom one. So we will engrave your name onto it.

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Okay, so I I’m excited to dive into the topic of fast finishers today because I feel like this is something that a lot of teachers struggle with. And even the students in the class and I even think back to when I was a student in the classroom, actually, and I was one of those students who would have finished quickly. And I would get bored. And that would lead to sometimes chatting even though I was like an A student, and I hated to get like reprimanded or anything like that. So I feel like it’s sometimes a challenge for the students who are in that situation. But then it’s challenging as a teacher, because you’re like, while these other students, they still need to be able to get have the time to get their work done. And then what do I do with all these other kids, because you don’t want to like start the next thing. So I’ve got 15 ideas for you today. And also, I want to mention, you know, I just came in right now from homeschooling my children.

So right now I’m homeschooling my third grader and my first grader pretty soon, we’ll get to start with my three year old doing some preschool stuff, although we’ll probably send him to a preschool our kids do kind of a charter where they go to some school, and then we do some at home, it’s, it’s actually really great, I love it. But this actually applies to homeschool too, because even when I’m working with my own children, I want the other children should not be distracting my child who I’m working with. So a lot of these things apply to the homeschool environment too. So if you’re one of our homeschool parents listening, this episode will apply to you as well. A lot of times, they do talk in teacher terms, because more of our listeners are classroom teachers at this point. But I want you to know that this does apply to you too, because I use it in my own family. And these are things that I would use in the classroom as well. Okay, so 15 ideas, these are still educational, some in a variety of different ways. They’re all going to be engaging the brain, some are going to be more strictly educational, some more kinesthetic, and we picked things that would be easy for you. Because I don’t want to add more to your plate, I don’t need to be like, oh, there’s so much more that I need to do. Because now you’re just telling me 15 more things I need to do. And that’s not the case. Like if you could just grab one from here and like, okay, I can handle that. That’s all that I want from you, you can take whatever you would like from this episode. But basically, we don’t want to make more work for you. We just want to give you ideas that actually make less work for you because your students are engaged.

Okay, so the first one is having open graphic organizers that you can be used with a book. Now, I know a lot of you for your fast finishers, you tell them to get a book and read. And that is a great thing to do. But sometimes like, especially if the kids are doing it, basically for everything like so throughout the day, they’re just being told, get out a book, get out a book, get out a book, there are ways that we can make getting out a book more engaging. So with that, you can have graphic organizers that aren’t specific to any book like not comprehension questions, were there for just one specific passage that can be used just one time. But like, Hey, I have this graphic organizer that’s about text questioning, or about making connections or about visualizing or about summarizing, or synthesizing or, you know, whatever, wherever your students are at, so that they can use it. And then they can switch which skill they’re working on each time and then they can be reused to so then you can like switch out the graphic organizer each time. So it can like work on one skill one time and then on another skill another time. And then they can also be reused. You can like cycle through them. So let’s say you have like five or six or seven different skills, then like once they used them all, then they go back to the first one. And then they’re filling it out for a different book or like a later chapter in the chapter book, depending on if they’re reading chapter books. And we have lots of options for these in our 36 weeks of reading comprehension skills. So I’ll make sure to link to those in the show notes. But I love those because they can just be used anytime they’re really open ended. You can use them for fast finishers, they’re great for that. They’re also great for like morning work or whatever. Today, we’re talking fast finishers. So definitely recommend for that. Okay, so for the second one, and I kind of alluded to this in the first one, but you can have actually specific reading passages with questions too. So you can have passages that you pronounce and have the questions to go with it. And ones that aren’t necessarily ones that you’re planning on grading or doing together as a whole class, but just if you have extra. So like if, for example, if you’re a Club member, and you have access to having all of our 36 weeks of the regular reading passages, and then you have all our monthly passages, maybe you select a couple of monthly passages each month, like two of them are ones that are just out for your bass finishers. And they can pick that passage and do that. And obviously, this will work with any passages, not just ours, but make sure the topics are engaging and that you’re able to mix it up and having them differentiated. So you can have different levels so the kids can do the ones that are appropriate to their level are also a good, that’s also a really great idea. So I would recommend making sure whatever passages you use, they are differentiated. And you can let them choose which topic they would like to read about on their level. So our passages will allow you to do that we have a great variety. So definitely check ours out. But there are lots of great ones out there too.

And if you listened to Episode Oh, I can’t remember which number but it’s the one that I talked about eight tips for choosing high quality reading materials. I talk a lot about reading passages in there, so be sure to check out that episode on the podcast. Okay. The number three idea for fast finishers is backwards story problems. Now these are really fun. So you start by telling kids that they’re going to be solving a story problem backwards. So after they give you a little, huh, what do you mean by that? Tell them they’re going to be given an answer. So look at numbers, let’s say the number is 16. Okay? And they’ll need to come up with a story problem question that leads to that answer. So they’re kind of doing it backwards. So first, they’ll write down as many equations as they can think of that would lead to that answer. So for 16 might be 15 plus one, or four times four, or 26 minus 10. Like think of as many questions as they can that would lead to that answer. Next, they can brainstorm some topic ideas for their problem, including who and what So who are some people could be in the story problem, and what might they be doing, then once they have that equation, the who and the how they’ll take that and put it into story problem format. So they’ll have the problem, though, right? The problem where it’s like, okay, so I’m gonna do a 15 plus one, and we’re gonna say it’s about Hannah. And we’re gonna say that Hannah is building a sandcastle and she wants to put seashells on it, she has 15 that are blue. And one that is, I mean, I’ve never actually found a blue seashell on a beach, let’s say black. So she has 15. They’re black, and one that is brown. So let’s say that she has those 15 plus one is 16 seashells, so they kind of have the equation and kind of have the story behind it, then the write that short story that incorporates the problem. So they put together the who the what the problem into that story. And then they can illustrate the story too. So it’s super fun, it really gets their son being creative, and thinking about math. So I just love this. And we have templates for this in our 36 weeks of backwards story problems that will kind of walk them through it because then you don’t have to be there standing there telling them how to do it and what to do. Because if this is a fast finisher activity, then you might be helping the students who are still working on their work. So if you have something to guide them through this process, that can be really helpful. So I will link to our 36 weeks of backwards story problems in the show notes. Okay, number four is engaging writing prompts.

So it’s always a fun idea to get our kids writing and doing a variety of different types of writing. So we would love to have them do like some narrative writing. So some examples of this would be like, write a story about a circus performer who runs away to work in an office, or the off of vacation write a story about a family on the worst vacation ever. Informative is another category we want kids to write about. So they could like describe a bad habit they have now and how they think they could break it. Or they could they were hired to build a birdhouse describe how they would design the birdhouse, then they could write about opinion writing. So if you had to lose one of your five senses, which would you choose to lose and why? Or another one could be which of the seven dwarves dark, happy, bashful, sleepy, sneezy, grumpy, or dopey are you most like, that’s a fun one. And then some descriptive writing examples would be like describe the most boring day you’ve had, but make it sound exciting, or describe the strangest meal you’ve ever had. And these writing prompts, they’re designed to be spread out that can be either used throughout the week or done all at once, depending on your needs. So you can if you use our 36 weeks writing prompts, we have them already done for you. But you could just come up with tons of ideas like those ones they needed to. And your fast finishers could just pick a prompt that sounds the most interesting to them and write on a piece of scratch paper or if you use ours, we’ve awesome graphic organizers that you can use for that. Okay, number five is online learning enrichment activities. And kids tend to get really excited when they get to do this when they get to like use the iPad or go to the computer or whatever technology that you have in your classroom with our kids charter we do our kids get access to Lexia, which is for reading and st math, which is like puzzle solving. But there are lots of different great sites and things that you can do. There’s one that’s called a Google a Day, which is a daily game that challenges students to practice finding information on the internet. And I think this is so fun, because we know the importance of being able to research and digital literacy in today’s world, and how much students need to know how to find correct information on the internet. Math hopless is another idea. So it’s like a daily math question for grades two through high school. And they can go back to previous questions. And it’s great to challenge students who need to challenge themselves with high level math Quizlet is another one where you can create vocab lists for your students, and they can choose different quizzes and games to practice on the vocab list and puzzle. You can pick videos with so many different websites or upload your own then you insert questions into the video for students to answer and you can set it so that students can’t move on until they get the questions correct. Questions can range for multiple choice true false or long or short answers. You can also create a WebQuest or quest garden These are fun, question driven activities that you can create and that your students can use the internet to find their answers is another great way to have them practice their research skills.

Okay, another one is the iCivics games. I Civic has lots of great us civics lesson plans. And our team member Megan used to use those with her students play fun games to learn about the United States and how government works. And they can create a law firm learn about the powers of the three branches of government try to pass the bill into law or even run for president. So I think this would be only for older students. But it sounds like such a great website. I’m really glad that my team member Megan told me about that. And the last one I have to share with you is National Geographic daily geo quiz each day, National Geographic offers six new questions every day about geography. And these are great, especially if you’re preparing for a geography. And it’s a great way to kind of fit more social studies in right because as we’ve talked about, on some past episodes, like Social Studies Research, when we just re aired, a lot of times Social Studies gets neglected. So this is a great way to kind of work it back in to your regular routines. Yeah, so those are just some really fun ideas that you can use for your online learning enrichment activities. And I will link to all of those in the show notes. Okay, so idea number six to challenge fast finishers is a 100 word activity. So this is a great critical thinking challenge, you can assign each letter the alphabet, a point value, such as a is one, point B is to point C is three points, and so on. And you can have them somewhere in the classroom. So students can see like the letters and their point value. And then students will pick words to total in points to try to find a word that totals 100 points. So for example, like teacher would be 60 points, education will be 92 points, etc. And you can make this into a fun classroom challenge to see how many 100 Point where’s the class confined, and then you could like publish Lowe’s. Such a fun idea, I feel like we should put together some kind of printable for that, we’ll add that to our list add to the club and to our TPT. Idea number seven to challenge fast finishers is a playdough station. Now this one may not be for every teacher classroom if you have the space because it can get a little messy, but you can say about Plato’s station.

And I really don’t think this even only needs to be for younger classrooms. I know that’s the general thinking is like Plato, oh, that’s like preschool, kindergarten, first grade. But I feel like all children would get super excited about this. And it’s tactile, you could even have them do spelling words with play dough. You can have challenge cards available such as build your house or make your favorite animal. And they’ll just love having that chance to play, especially those younger ones really do need that chance to play as they’re learning. But the older ones, like I mentioned, they can totally benefit from that, too. Okay, so idea number eight is color by numbers. So we love Color by Number at wife, teacher, Mommy. And it doesn’t have to be like just you know, seven is green. But you can have like math problems, you can have color by word, we have some great pre made options for you and are ready to go sub plans for pre K kindergarten in first grade. But then we also even have some for older grades in our I believe they’re in our monthly sub plans and definitely in like snow day pockets and a lot of our other resources too. So Color by Number is an awesome resource for challenging fast finishers. Okay, so idea number 10 is journal writing. And I feel like this is like a lost skill a lot of times in our in our world where we’re just so busy and go go go all the time. But journal writing and just kind of writing how your day is going what you did, it can help us like solidify our memories, because we think we’ll remember things like it’s kind of like I’ve been telling my husband recently is like, oh, there are things that when your kid is currently doing it, you’re like, there’s no way I’ll ever forget this. They say that all the time, or they do this all the time. And then later you do forget. And then something either whether it was a journal entry, or a picture or a video, you see it again, you’re like, Oh, my goodness, I totally forgot about that. So I feel like journal writing is a great way for students to kind of write about what they’re doing, what they’re doing in third grade, or whatever grade level they’re in, and how they’re feeling who their friends are like, and then it helps them with their writing.

So I feel like that is another great thing that they can do when they’re done with their work. And kind of related to that number 10 is to write a letter, I feel like again, another loss skill because a lot of times we use the internet or texting when we do that we don’t pay attention to like the format like having the dear whoever and then like writing the all the different parts of the letter, right. So with that you can have students practice writing letters, and they can write thank you letters, which is great because that ties in writing, and the parts of a letter and gratitude all together. So we have some awesome templates for you that you can also check out in our writing prompts for letter writing. And they’re also in our ready to go sub plans to K idea number 11. To challenge fast finishers is directed drawing. So your students or children will love learning to draw each object using Easy to follow directions. It’s like really tactile for them and helps with their like pencil grip. If they’re learning that or just, you know, their artistry, like art is important to not just the core subjects. So once they finish their journey, they can complete sentences or read a story about their drawing. And so they get that writing into and we have tons of directed drawings in wife, teacher mommy club, we have monthly themed ones, and then we have some fairytale ones. And there we have a calendar one where they get to like do there’s a picture to go with each month and then at the end it creates a calendar, which is great for sending home for like a holiday gift or at the beginning of the year or at the end of the school year that students can create that and then give it to their parents or guardians at home. So we love that one. These are all exclusive to wife teacher mommy club members.

So if you’re a member, be sure to go download those if you’re not we would love for you to join us the doors aren’t always open if you go to wife, teacher, Mommy club.com Or just our website you can look there to find out and either join the waiting list might be able to request an invite for one of the limited spots while the doors are closed. Okay, so idea number 12 is to challenge fast finishers with a research project with a topic of their choice. And we talked a lot about this on the episode of the podcast about five ways to skyrocket your students research skills, so I’m not gonna go super in depth on it. But if you have students kind of pick a topic that they want to research about and kind of start working on their research journal, when they’re done with their work, that is a great way to do it. And definitely check out Episode Five on that. And also, we just re aired it too. So you shouldn’t even have to scroll that far to find it. So it was a listener favorite one of our top episodes, so be sure to check it out. Now, idea number 13 Is you having math or language arts board games, or card games available for students to do there are lots of fun ones on Amazon. And my kids. And I know I mentioned these on the podcast before, but they’re still loving sums in space and dinosaur tracks sums in space. They do addition and subtraction, and then dinosaur tracks. It’s all about place value. And we also have printable games in all our monthly sub plans. And many of our resources actually in wife, teacher mommy club, and they’re so fun. They have them themed for holidays and the cards are mixed up. You can practice math facts, vocab, words, language arts concepts, and you can just print them out. So that’s nice. It’s a lot cheaper. Okay, so idea number 14 is to do a puzzle puzzles are really good for the brain. And I want to share something that I found when I was Googling so working on a puzzle reinforces connections between brain cells, it improves mental speed. And it’s an effective way to improve short term memory.

They increase the production of dopamine, which is probably a term you’ve heard before, is a chemical that regulates mood, memory and concentration. And it’s released with every success as we solve the puzzle. So these are a great thing to do when there’s a break and super easy for you like all you have to do is make sure that you have puzzles on hand that the students know where to go grab one. And our last and final tip is fixing sentences. And this is great grammar and writing practice all in one. And to make it fun because this can kind of feel like a monotonous task. Have them get out a red marker and mark the sentences up as if they’re the teacher you can tell them like hey, this is like pretend you’re the teacher and you’re grading on these sentences, and then they can rewrite the sentence correctly. And we have a full year of fixing sentence is ready to go for you with our 36 weeks of fixing sentences. So be sure to check those out. We’ll link to those in the show notes. Okay, so let’s recap all 15 ideas really quick. So number one was a graphic organizer with a book number two was reading passages with comprehension questions. Number three was backwards story problems. Number four is engaging writing prompts. Number five is on my learning enrichment activities. Number six is that 100 word activity number seven is a playdough station number eight Color by Number Number nine is journal writing. Number 10 is writing letters especially thank you letters. Number 11 is directed joins number 12 is working on an assigned research project. Number 13 is a math or Language Arts Board Game Number 14 is a puzzle and number 15 is fixing sentences. And as I mentioned, lots of these we already have ready to go for you. Like I said at the beginning of this podcast, we want it to be super easy for you. We don’t want it to feel like it’s another thing on your plate. So I will link to those in the show notes. And if you’re a member of the club, be sure you’ve logged into your club account so you can download the activities and make good use of your club experiences.

I love that you’re able to just download all those resources, make use of them in the classroom and also attend all of our calls and events like I just I love all of our members. So most of the activities though if you’re not a member are also on our shop and Teachers Pay Teachers. Now if you found anything useful in this episode, be sure to leave a review and email it to us at Hello at wife teacher mommy.com or DMS at wife teacher mommy on Instagram you’ll be entered to win the for one on one live coaching sessions three months of wife teacher mommy club and that custom stainless steel tumbler with your name and whatever saying you would like on it if you were chosen as the winner. So that will be announced early next week either January 3 or fourth 2023. Now stay tuned for next week’s episode, I have an interview with Brittany Blackwell from the resilient teacher all about the stress cycle, which is a super fascinating concept and I cannot wait for you to listen to this interview. So make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss it.

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