A Different Type of Reading Quiz - Snowball Fight

I decided to invite mass chaos into my room today.  Why?  Mostly I was bored.

I was bored with normal reading quizzes to check/reward my students reading two difficult chapters of Wuthering Heights. I like 6 questions quizzes, but I do those all the time.  I also like the Spark Notes quiz for something extra, but I had already given that one earlier.   I remember reading something called the Snowball Quiz, but I don't remember the details other than it involved throwing paper balls.  So I decided to just invent my own rules as best as possible.

The first thing I did was to have students create six questions (plus an extra credit question) and write them on a sheet of paper with space between each one.  They were not to answer the questions, just create them and know the answer.  Once everyone had six questions, I gave them each one octopus sticker.  Then they were to stand up and ball up their paper.  The first class I tried this on was small, so I broke the class into two teams.  The second class was large, so I made it every students for him/herself.

When I yelled THROW, the students started throwing the "snowballs" at each other.  After a few seconds of that, I yelled STOP! and they grabbed the closest paper ball, unraveled it, and (as long it was not their own) then they were to put their name under Question 1 and answer the question.  Just the first question.  If they did not want to answer that question or they felt the question was not worded well, they could put the octopus sticker down instead to absolve them of that question.

Once answered, they were to ball up the paper and stand up.  Once all were standing, we threw at each other again.  Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

When we got to the extra credit, I told them to answer the extra credit and then turn the paper face down and draw the person that created the questions.  After some time, they had to return the quizzes to the creator and grade them,  The person who drew the smiley face on the back got three bonus points if the grader felt it was complimentary.

It was lots of fun!  Here are a few take aways:

• Students need to write in pen.  You can see from the picture that pencil does not hold up well.
• This took WAY more time than I expected it to take (about 30-40 minutes)
• Notebook paper vs copy paper - no real difference
• The second class, being bigger, lost one quiz.  I just adapted by saying one person would be given a bye for that round.
• Grading it was easier than I thought it would be.  I printed a roster and and just recorded the wrong answers from each.  

In the end, it was a fun way to review the chapter and something that I think I will do once a year from now on.