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!
