Green Highlighter Activity

I stumbled across this activity while researching teaching radicals.  I loved the idea and can see using it any class for anything from warm-ups and bell ringers to daily work to exit tickets.  Everything!  With just a small modification, it can be used with digital devices.

I found it on the Simplify with Me and the author modified it from Square Root of Negative One Math.  The idea is pretty cool.

1.  Assign a few problems.

2.  A student finishes the assigned work.  The work is checked by the teacher.  If it is correct, the student is given a green pen or highlighter.  If not the student tries again.

3.  The student takes the green highlighter or pen and goes around to help other students.

4. As other students get the right answer, they receive a green pen and go help others. 

5.  The teacher only looks for those students who have done the problems correctly. 

6.  It is up to the students to help each other until everyone has it done.

7.  Assign a few more problems and repeat.

This is cool in that the students who finish first are given something to do rather than just giving them more problems to do and they get so far ahead that those who struggle never catch up.  I really like this idea.

As far a doing it on digital devices,  You can pick up stylos for cheap on Amazon.  Get a bunch of those and hand them out to the students instead of green highlighters so they can write on tablets.

This can be used for any topic at any time, easy to implement and its not that expensive to pick up several boxes of green highlighters.  This keeps students occupied who finish first and gives the chance for others to get caught up.  It also implements peer tutoring effectively and shifts learning from teacher driven to student driven.

This is cool.  I am off to order multiple boxes of green highlighters so I can start doing it in March. I also have several stylos around for when we used digital devices.