Question of the Day Ideas for Middle School Students

Question of the Day Ideas

What is the Question of the Day? Why should I use it? If you are looking for Question of the Day ideas or simply how to incorporate them in your classroom, look no further! Taking five minutes to include the Question of the Day in your classroom’s daily routine can help build meaningful community in your classroom and foster confidence in your students. As a bonus, you get to learn more about your students on a personal level and vice versa! In this post, we will cover three reasons to use a Question of the Day in your classroom, as well as how to incorporate the activity into your daily routine.

What is the Question of the Day

The Question of the Day is a daily question to ask your students to encourage them to reflect and share more about themselves. These questions can be as simple as “What is your favorite color?”, “Where is your favorite place you have visited and why?” and “What is your favorite movie?”. They can also be much deeper, such as “If you could make something better about your town, what would you change?” or “What is one word that describes your personality or who you are as a person?”. You do not need to have all your students share their answers, but you can encourage as many answers as people want to share. This activity won’t eat up a lot of your class time and easily fits into your daily agenda as a warm-up activity that engages your students!

3 Reasons to Use Question of the Day

1. Create Community

As a daily, active participant in your students’ lives, you value building relationships with your students so that they feel valued as members of your classroom and cared for as individuals. Many teachers focus on “get to know you” activities at the beginning of the school year. While this is great for building a solid foundation, it can be helpful to continue these activities throughout the year to get to know your students (and each other) even better! A research study conducted by Tasha Keyes in 2019 found that students determined more successful teachers by choosing the ones that demonstrated care and respect for them by taking the time to get to know them and then using that information to relate to them in class (Keyes, 2019). Using the Question of the Day is an easy way to build these meaningful relationships by learning more about them and incorporating aspects of their interests/lives, perhaps, into your daily lessons. It is a joy to see students get to know one another better and form relationships and friendships with one another that might not have happened otherwise, especially with those quieter and more introverted students.

2. Promote Student Engagement

Many students often find it difficult to raise their hands and participate in class on a regular basis, perhaps for fear of saying the wrong answer or simply not feeling comfortable speaking in front of a room full of their peers. The list of reasons for not speaking up in class is long, many of which are out of your control and may seem like a daunting task to get students to share in class. However, reinforcing the concept of a classroom being a community, a research study performed in 2018 on student engagement across multiple subjects in four different schools showed that you, the teacher, have a significant impact on student engagement. The study showed that it was more than just the students engaging with each other that increased individual participation. Rather, it was the students and the teacher together interacting as a community that had an impact on increasing classroom engagement in students (T. D. Nguyen et al., 2018). Thus, the Question of the Day activity can be a small way to boost your students’ confidence as well as foster a judgment-free community of engagement in the classroom. It is a great “low stakes” opportunity for students to participate and jump-start their engagement for later on in class when you are working on actual class content! Students are usually excited and eager to share about themselves- why not tap into that energy at the beginning of each class period?

3. Build Student Speaking Skills

Another great reason to use The Question of the Day is to help build your students’ speaking skills in presenting to the class! You could have a different student present the Question of the Day, almost as a rotating classroom “job,” and have them act as the teacher to call on other students to share their responses. Or, just having the students share their responses with the class each day is still a great way to practice those public speaking and communication skills!

How to Structure The Question of the Day in Your Classroom

There are so many ways to incorporate The Question of the Day into your daily routine. You can have the question up on your PowerPoint slides, already projected when students walk into your classroom, to give them something to get started on or think about even before the bell rings. You could also give students time to write down their responses in their notebooks to allow them to prepare their thoughts and be ready to share. You could have students share their responses with just their peers or with the whole class. We didn’t require all students to share their answers with the class, but we always gave the opportunity to share to any students who wanted to share!

Finally, the Question of the Day activity can happen at the beginning of the class period, but it doesn’t have to! Using this activity in the middle of the class period could serve as a “mental break,” fill up the extra time at the end of the class period, or just a fun way to wrap up class! If you are looking for other fun ideas for how to fill extra class time, we’ve got a blog post here that offers 10 creative and no-prep ways to fill up those dreaded extra minutes that keep your students engaged!

Question of the Day for Middle Schoolers

If you love this idea of the Question of the Day but don’t want to spend your free time coming up with more than a hundred questions on your own, you’re in luck! We’ve already done the work for you and created 175 “Questions of the Day” in a digital, editable format that is ready for your use! The Question of the Day Google slide is easy to add to your daily agenda slides, or you can print them out as mini cards and can easily be used in person or on Zoom (or any other related platform). Even if you didn’t start the Question of the Day at the beginning of the school year as part of your daily routine, it’s never too late to start! This is a great activity to add to your daily routine that the students will love!

Question of the Day

The Question of the Day is a great activity that your students will look forward to every day. It will help them build meaningful relationships with their peers and yourself and help them gain ownership of their classroom learning experience. It is an easy and quick way to get your students warmed up for class by sharing something about themselves. I hope you consider using the Question of the Day activity and giving your students a year-round opportunity to share about themselves and build a more intentional, engaged classroom community!

Are you looking for even more new teaching ideas to engage your students in your social studies class? If so, you’ll love our free guide: “5 Creative Projects to Ignite Student Engagement in Your Social Studies Class.” These activities have both printable and digital options and can work for any social studies subject!

Modern American History Word Wall: A How-To Guide

Modern American History Word Wall

Have you ever used a Modern American History word wall before? Word walls can be a helpful tool your students can use to remember and better understand the vocabulary words that connect with whatever historical topic you’re teaching. In this previous blog post, we’ve briefly discussed word walls, however, we wanted to give a more thorough guide on how to use them in this post, as well as share examples that pertain to Modern United States history.

Creating a Word Wall

The first step in creating a word wall is choosing which words to use and how you want each card to look. There are multiple ways to do this, depending on your preference. Some cards just have the word, some add a definition, and some include an image. In our teaching experience, we’ve found the most helpful cards use all three, which help support our visual learners. We like including definitions because it can create a “dictionary wall” that students can refer back to throughout the year. You can find examples of our word wall template here.

Once you have decided which words you will include, you will then decide how you want to organize them. You can see a few examples in the pictures below.

Vocab Word of The Day

To break up your Modern American History vocabulary words into smaller, more doable pieces, consider our strategy of teaching one word per day. Going over the vocabulary words gradually will allow you to go into more depth with each word. You could even use this as part of your daily warm-up activity!

Organize by Theme

Another option is to organize your words by theme. While teachers of younger students may organize words alphabetically, consider instead organizing by theme to help students make connections. For example, you might create categories of people, places, events, documents, and more! For your convenience, our Modern American History Word Wall cards are color-coded by historical timeframe. So while using this method, students would still have a way to remember which word belongs to each historical point in time.

Modern American Word Walls for Each Unit

The main method we’ve used in the past is breaking up our word walls by unit. This especially works well if you have limited wall space. Simply display the words for each Modern United States History unit all at once on a bulletin board or area of your classroom. To make life easier, there are usually a couple of students who would love to help you change out the board once they’ve finished an assignment.

If you’re interested in checking out our Modern American History word wall cards, check out our epic bundle or any of our individual sets below!

Reconstruction Word Wall

Tensions in the West Word Wall

Industrialization Word Wall

Immigration and Urbanization Word Wall

Progressive Era Word Wall

American Imperialism Word Wall

World War 1 Word Wall

Roaring Twenties Word Wall

Great Depression Word Wall

World War 2 Word Wall

Cold War Word Wall

Civil Rights Movement Word Wall

Vietnam Era World Wall

Late 20th Century Word Wall

21st Century Word Wall

Since originally posting this blog, we now have vocabulary activities for each of the topics included in this post! They are all included in this bundle (but you can also click on the specific units you need).

If you’re interested in early American History word walls, we have a complete word wall bundle you can check out here!

Are you looking for some new teaching ideas to engage your students in your social studies class? If so, you’ll love our FREE guide: 5 Creative Projects to Ignite Student Engagement in Your Social Studies Class. These activities have both printable and digital options and can work for any social studies subject!

Teaching Job Skills in Middle School

Teaching Job Skills

Middle school is a crucial time for students to start thinking about their future careers and what they want to do when they grow up. As educators, we must provide our students with the tools and resources they need to make informed decisions about their future careers. One of the best ways to do this is by teaching job skills in middle school. By providing students with hands-on experience and career exploration opportunities, we can help them understand the different career options available to them and make more informed decisions about their future.

Job Skills for Students

While middle school students are not yet ready to look into higher education and figure out their exact career path, the earlier they start thinking about it, the better. This post will focus on two areas: activities to promote job skills and ideas for career exploration.

Job Skills Activities

Two important components of getting a job include writing a resume and completing job interviews. No matter what career path students choose, these steps will be necessary for students to complete. However, teaching students how to write a resume can be tricky. That’s why we created this resume template that does all the work for you! It guides students through the process of writing a resume in an easy-to-understand way. It also includes a corresponding slideshow to provide an overview of each topic.

Hosting mock interviews can also be a useful practice opportunity for job skills. A mock interview helps students get a taste of what a job interview might be like and gives them a chance to practice articulating themselves. They can even practice giving a proper handshake! This kit gives students a list of mock interview questions, a slideshow overview about interviews, a grading sheet, and a sign-up sheet for when you host mock interviews. Once students had completed their resume activity and the mock interview practice questions, I interviewed them one on one. I asked about five questions to each student, tailoring my questions to their desired future job.

Career Exploration Activities

To help students know what job they might be interested in, career exploration is a must! If your school provides access to them, there are some great online quizzes and programs for career exploration out there. Personality tests could also be a useful activity to complement career exploration quizzes. However, if you don’t have access to these tests or are looking for something different, you might like our Career ABC Slideshow. An ABC slideshow is a great activity when you have many topics or ideas to cover, such as different careers.

In this research project, students will create one slide in a Google Slideshow about a job that starts with each letter of the alphabet. Each slide will include key details about each job, such as the job description, the schooling required, and the average salary. After students have all completed their Google Slideshows, they will each present a selection of slides to the class, giving students a chance to learn about even more job opportunities!

After students have completed some career exploration activities, it is helpful to teach them about career trade-offs. While it would be amazing if there were a completely perfect job, that doesn’t exist. Each job has trade-offs… some positive and some negative factors that can affect one’s life. This slideshow and graphic organizer/activity walk students through the topics of salary, work-life balance, impact, hours, location, benefits and insurance, advancement, job security, and more. Students can spend more time researching and applying these different topics to jobs they are interested in to better understand what might be a good fit for their future.

Job Skills in History Classes

The ideas previously described work great in a careers class, but what if you teach history, social studies, or even language arts instead? You might not think that you have time to teach job skills, but there are some unique project ideas that you could apply to any historical unit. For example, you could have students write a resume for a U.S. President (or leader of your respective country), a famous inventor, a social justice activist, or even a character in a book your students have read about. Students can follow the provided template and look up key events and accomplishments from each person. This assignment will teach students about the historical figure and how to set up a resume all at once!

If you are an Ancient Civilizations teacher, we wrote 24 different resumes for important leaders in the ancient world. Resumes include Hammurabi, Hatshepsut, Siddhartha Gautama, Emperor Wu of Han, Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and so many more! In this activity, students can read over the resumes and hire the leader they believe would be the best candidate for the selected careers. This resource includes everything you would need to succeed, including several graphic organizers and an explanation of each available job. You can check out the complete bundle here, but the resumes for each unit are also available as separate sets if you prefer.

Classroom Jobs

While classroom jobs can honestly be more about saving yourself time, they still have a place in teaching job skills to middle school students. Students can take on leadership roles in the classroom and gain some additional skills. In this resource, students must complete an application if they are interested in having a classroom job, with 11 job options and business cards that are ready-made!

We hope this post gives you some new ideas about teaching job skills to your middle school. This can be an essential part of preparing your students for their futures, no matter what path they choose!

If you are interested, we also have some other life skills resources described in this blog post for the first week of middle school.

Spring Classroom Activities for Middle School

Spring Classroom Activities

Spring is coming up, and it often brings rapidly changing weather, some much-needed time off with Spring Break, and new opportunities for a fresh start! It is also a great time to freshen up your classroom activities and engage your middle school students in new and seasonal ways. This post will share some spring classroom activities and some ideas to bring the outdoors inside.

Teaching Ideas for Spring

Freshen up your teaching from the moment students walk into your classroom with these spring-themed daily agenda slides. You could also incorporate spring-related topics into your pre-existing lessons. Some examples of this could be research projects related to national parks, creative writing activities about the changing of the seasons or nature in general, or even math problems or data analysis about bird migrations, changing weather, or types of flowers.

Since students may be doing more silent reading as a result of some standardized testing that happens during the spring, we also have some spring-themed printable coloring bookmarks that might be fun for your students to use!

Finally, under the idea of “spring cleaning”, many students may benefit from taking some time to clean out their lockers, binders, folders, and more. As a bonus, prepare a list of classroom organizational projects that you can have your most organized students work on during this time! This will give both you and your students a fresh start.

Spring Classroom Decor

Decorating your classroom for spring is a great way to create a positive and inviting learning environment for your students. One way to do this is by incorporating natural elements such as flowers, plants, and nature-inspired artwork into your decor. Fake plants work too! You could also use spring-themed bulletin board displays, such as our spring-themed inspirational quote bulletin board.

Furthermore, you could also incorporate the use of natural light in your classroom by opening windows or using an essential oil diffuser with a fresh scent, if permitted by your district. During independent student work time, you could even consider playing some calming or inspirational instrumental music. It was easy to find versions of these on YouTube that were several hours long!

Spring Break Activities

In the days leading up to spring break, it can be a lot of fun to do a countdown activity. This goes beyond a simple countdown on the board. Instead, with this resource, there is a short activity to do with your students each day over the course of the 5 days before break! These activities include a spring trivia challenge, a mystery location challenge, a spring word scramble, a spring picture guessing game, and a spring word search! If you are only looking for an activity to do on the last day before spring break, we have a printable bingo game you can do instead.

One of our newest resources is this highly engaging game-based simulation that is perfect for the last day before Spring Break! In this activity, students will be planning a spring break trip for themselves and their friends. They will need to make many different types of decisions related to budgeting, problem-solving, and executive functioning skills as they prepare their trips! This no-prep simulation will be a lot of fun for you and your students!

If you are interested in all of our spring activities and resources, you can save over 30% when you get them in this bundle!

If you want to check out some other classroom decoration ideas, check out our blog post about 8 Classroom Decor Themes for Middle School.

8 Budget-Friendly Prizes for Students

Prizes for Students

As educators, we know the importance of rewarding students for their hard work and achievements. However, classroom budgets can be tight, and we believe that teachers shouldn’t have to spend money repeatedly on prizes for students. So, how do we provide students with meaningful prizes without breaking the bank? Here are eight budget-friendly prize ideas that your middle school students will enjoy!

Classroom Reward Ideas

Reward Coupons

If you want an all-in-one solution, these printable and editable reward coupons can’t be beaten! There are ten different options, including rewards like choose your seat, listen to music, drop a low score, take an open note test/quiz, and more! As an added bonus, they are all editable! Check out this set here.

Homework Passes

Printable homework passes are a classic prize that are easy to have on hand at all times. These can be used on homework assignments up to a certain number of points, or they can be for extra credit points redeemed before the end of the grading period.

Our homework passes are also one of our essential classroom forms, which you can learn more about from this blog post.

Positive Parent Contact

A positive phone call home to a parent or guardian can be a wonderful way to not only reward a student but also to build meaningful relationships with them and help keep communication open. This can especially be an impactful reward if these students have not generally received positive phone calls from the school. You can chat about the student’s academic successes, why you enjoy having them in class, how they have improved, some positive character they have demonstrated, or anything else you’d like to share!

Certificates

These can be as simple or as elaborate as you like, but they are a great way to recognize student achievement, especially at the end of a month, quarter, or semester. Use a free online certificate maker or create your own using a program like Canva.

Printable Bookmarks

Many students can benefit from using bookmarks with their silent reading books or even their textbooks, and they become more fun when they can color their own designs! This epic set of printable coloring bookmarks can be a lot of fun and make for great prizes. For best results, we recommend printing them on cardstock or thicker paper.

If you are an Ancient Civilizations teacher, we also have this bundle with designs that pertain to Prehistoric Times, Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, Ancient China, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and the Middle Ages!

School Supplies

Since many students often struggle to prepare for class, providing writing utensils or other school supplies can solve multiple issues! Getting a big pack of pens or pencils, especially if they are clearanced at the end of back to school season, can be a great prize option!

Decluttered Items

While this idea might be unconventional, it was very popular with my eighth graders, and I’m guessing other grades would like it too! I tried to declutter unnecessary items from my classroom periodically and my life in general, and also had family members who were trying to simplify too. I set up periodic raffles with my students with extra school supplies that I no longer needed, old National Geographic magazines, random items I wanted to “regift,” and even some old Beanie Babies I had gotten as a kid that were still in pretty good condition.

If students were interested, they could enter their names in the drawing by writing their names on a Post-it I put next to each item, and then my advisory students would help me draw names using a random generator at the end of the day. While it seems simple, and one might not think that anyone would want their old stuff, I was happy to get rid of it, and my students were so excited!

Free Time

While this reward should definitely be used sparingly, students do love free time, especially if they normally have a hectic schedule. You could provide 10 or 15 minutes of free time as a whole-class reward, such as if they received an awesome report from a sub or demonstrated better behavior than normal on a field trip or at an assembly. As an added perk, a bit of free time can give you a bit of time to check in with students about missing assignments. Periodically, my students could earn a whole day of class as a free day if they won the grand prize in my class competition classroom management strategy. I’m sure I’ll share more about this in a future blog post, so stay tuned for that!

Gifts for Students From Teachers

In addition to using these ideas for prizes for students, you could also use them for gifts for students for certain holidays, birthdays, or the end of the year. At the middle school level, gifts are usually less formal, so one of these items could definitely be enough, such as a homework pass. At the elementary level, birthdays are generally a bigger deal, so perhaps some of these elements or ideas could be part of the overall gift.

Simulation Games for Your Ancient Civilizations Class

Simulation Games

Have you wanted to try out simulation games in your Ancient Civilizations class but weren’t sure where to start? Or you didn’t want to spend all of your free time putting something together? If so, this post will help! We’ll share ideas about what makes for a great simulation experience and walk through some examples for each civilization your students might study throughout the year.

Teaching with Simulations

Why should you consider teaching with simulations? Simulations have the opportunity to bring a historical topic to life in a way that more traditional activities cannot. This is especially true when students are taking on new roles or actions that relate to how people might have lived or the choices they could have made in the past. Simulations can also present information in a new way that can be more exciting and engaging than traditional teaching methods. Because of this, and since they have more of a personal stake in the topic, students will be more likely to retain what they learned.

There are a lot of simulations out there, but we have found that from a teacher perspective, some simulations are simply too much work. We don’t believe that a simulation should require teachers to purchase a bunch of supplies ahead of time, transform their whole classroom, and cut up or assemble supplies. That’s too time-consuming, so we designed all of our simulations to require no additional supplies (besides printing out the student handouts), no assembly, and an effortless experience going through the guided slideshow!

We have also found that some simulations try to bring certain events to life that could be harmful to certain students, especially in the case of difficult historical events. Therefore, we do not recommend using simulations in these contexts.

Ancient Civilizations Simulations

Are you looking for simulations to use in your Ancient Civilizations class? Keep scrolling to check out each of the following simulations: Early Humans Survival Simulation, Persian Empire Simulation, Nile River Simulation, Mohenjo Daro Simulation, Silk Road Simulation, Ancient Greece Panhellenic Games Simulation, Roman Empire Archaeological Simulation, and Knighthood Simulation!

These are all game-based simulations that each cover a variety of rounds. While each simulation varies slightly, each round addresses a specific topic that is relevant to that simulation. Students will usually need to make a decision about what they might have done during that time period, or they may roll the dice to see what they might have experienced. Whether they make a choice, roll the dice, or even if they do both in a round, students will gain or lose points, which adds an extra fun and competitive element to the simulation! Most of our simulations also include explanation slides and trivia questions to help students better understand what happened during the round and why they might have received the points they did.

Early Humans Simulation

Students will learn what it took to survive during prehistoric times with this Survival Simulation! They will need to choose a location, prepare a shelter, find or create tools, find food, migrate to new places, and more. This will help students understand just how difficult it might have been to survive without the many conveniences that make life possible and quite comfortable today.

Mesopotamia Simulation

As Mesopotamia was made up of several different groups over an extended period, we chose to focus on the Persian Empire and its achievements for this simulation. Students will serve as administrators to a Persian ruler and complete a variety of professional duties related to the government, the economy, taxation, use of the Royal Roads, and the construction of Persepolis through different scenarios.

Ancient Egypt Simulation

In this simulation, students will travel along the Nile River and learn about how it made life possible in Ancient Egypt. They will choose where they will live along the Nile River, set up a farm, trade their goods, and learn about the geography of the Nile River through different scenarios!

Ancient India Simulation

Mohenjo-Daro became a famous historical site as it was the largest city built by the Indus Valley Civilization, and it featured impressive urban planning and design elements. In this simulation, students will take on the role of an urban planner to design a city like Mohenjo-Daro. They will make choices related to the best building materials, adaptations to the climate, methods to keep the city safe and clean, and more!

Ancient China Simulation

To bring the study of Ancient China to life, students will travel and trade along the Silk Road in our Silk Road Simulation, collecting as many of the items as they can along their journey. Each round, they will choose a new city to travel to, get access to new traded goods, see what challenges they might have encountered, and answer a trivia question about the Silk Road!

Ancient Greece Simulation

The Ancient Greeks are well-known for their Olympic Games, so in this simulation, students will “compete” in several of the games popular in ancient times. These events or rounds include trumpeters and heralds, long jump, discus, footrace, javelin, wrestling, chariot race, and pankration. Students will participate in a classroom-friendly version of these games and also answer trivia questions about them. This could also be used as an activity prior to the modern winter or summer games, as it would provide more historical context.

Ancient Rome Simulation

As Roman Emperors conquered new territories, the size of the Roman Empire grew substantially. In this Roman Empire Archaeological Simulation, students take on the role of archaeologists to dig for artifacts at six different Roman sites. These sites include Roman Egypt, Gaul, Roman Britain, Pompeii, Rome, and Constantinople. Your students will have a great time learning about these different artifacts and locations!

Middle Ages Simulation

In this simulation, students take on the role of working to become a knight. They will begin their training by becoming a page and becoming a squire, before they become a knight in a knighthood ceremony. There are also rounds pertaining to chivalry, life on a feudal manor, and fighting in the Crusades! How will your students fare as medieval knights?

We hope you give simulations a try with your students! We have other game-based simulations for other subjects that you can check out here!

If you are looking for other resources and teaching ideas for Ancient Civilizations, check out this blog post about setting up an Ancient Civilizations Word Wall!