![]() ![]() For best results, show them a few examples of thoughtfully written notes ahead of time. Provide them with paper and envelopes and have them write thank-you notes to friends, family members, school staff members, or other students. Thank-You Notes: Since this important life skill isn’t really a part of any curriculum, a Lame Duck day is a perfect time to have students practice it and show some gratitude to the people who deserve it.Go back a few years to learn the Cupid Shuffle, further back to learn the Macarena or go way back and learn the Hustle. What’s great about line dancing is that anyone can do it, whether they have rhythm or not. Learn a Line Dance: Either you teach your students, they teach each other, or you all learn together from YouTube.Clean-up Day: Give students a chance to clean out their binders or lockers and enlist students to help tidy the classroom as well.They can be used as a 10-minute filler or as the main activity for a whole class period. These activities can be done at a moment’s notice, with little to no required materials. Some list items contain Amazon Affiliate links if you purchase from Amazon after going through these links, Cult of Pedagogy receives a small commission at no extra cost to you. I’ve broken this list into three sections, based on how much prep you’d need to do to for each one and how much time each one would take. Some of these ideas come from my own teaching experience, others come from online resources, and a lot of them are from a Facebook Live broadcast I did a few weeks ago, where other teachers contributed their own ideas. ![]() So if you’ve decided you want to do something else, or you’ve been told you flat-out have to, here’s a great list for what to do instead. HOWEVER…when it comes time to plan for Lame Duck days, we really do have so many more options beyond the showing of videos. This is why I would never support a school banning videos across the board that kind of blunt policy doesn’t respect teachers’ ability to make the best instructional choices for students. So I get that it’s not the worst thing you can do, and I know it CAN be done right. Take it with a grain of salt, because (a) I totally showed movies when I needed a day to grade papers and get caught up, and (b) I’m fully aware that a TON of absolutely amazing movies, video clips, and documentaries are absolutely jam-packed with educational value. Okay, that’s my rant about showing movies in class. Surely school can step it up a notch? What’s worse, “show a movie” in some classes actually means “Put a movie on, but let students do whatever they want while the movie provides background noise.” And when the movie is, say, The Sound of Music, or some other classic I have waited years to experience with my kids, and then they tell me their music teacher puts it on all the time, I feel robbed as a parent. I mean, I can show my kids a movie at home. And I understand why: As a parent, when ask my kids what they did in school on any given day, and I hear “watched a movie,” I’m annoyed. I worked in a place like that, although near the end, we were starting to get pressured to cut that out. In some schools, they’ll still let you show movies. We often call the activities we need for these times “sponge activities.” Regardless of what you call it or how much you need, we all have those times when students are right in front of us but the regularly scheduled programming just isn’t going to work. Sometimes instead of days, we have small bursts of Lame Duck time: The leftover 15 minutes after the fire drill, when you know you don’t have enough time to actually finish the lesson you were teaching, but you don’t want to just let them sit there. On these Lame Duck days, it’s hard to figure out what we can do to still provide valuable learning experiences for our students. In some cases, like on standardized test days in certain districts, teachers are explicitly told they CAN’T plan regular instruction. We have something like that in school: those days when technically we’re still in school, but because it’s right before vacation, the end of the school year is near, or we’re in the middle of standardized testing, those class hours don’t have the same instructional potential as your average school day. Technically this person is still the president, but his or her decision-making power is generally perceived to be minimal. The term “lame duck” is most often used to describe a president who is still sitting in office after his or her successor has been elected. ![]()
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