3 Awesome (and Helpful) Exit Ticket Ideas

Happy Friday Jr., all! Tomorrow will our my LAST day before Spring Break and, if the nuttiness level in my classroom today was any indication, thriving on Friday the 13th will require many many MANY cups of coffee (thank goodness for my classroom Keurig!), a great night of sleep tonight (ha, yeah right!), and a whole lot of prayer! As we’re approaching 4th quarter, I’m finding that we need to jazz up our classroom environment a bit, to just do something different and fun, while still applying content knowledge. Check out three exit ticket ideas we’ve been using over the past few days (or will be using soon!) to add a bit of variety into our classroom environment!

TWITTER TIME!
You should have HEARD my students’ response to “Twitter Time” on the daily task/learning target list on Monday! “Are we getting on Twitter?” “Are we going to follow POTUS?” Holy moly! I told them it was a surprise for them before they head to their next class. As time ticked by and it was time for our exit ticket, they were super curious. When I shared the Twitter template with them, they were a little bummed that they wouldn’t be actually getting on Twitter for class, but were excited to explain what they learned in only 280 characters … and they were able to use slang and hashtags. WIN! Check out the template here and use it in your classroom!

STICKY NOTE STACKS
While this exit ticket is fun, encourages communication, collaboration, review, AND reflection, while providing me with some ah-mazing data to drive instruction … they used a lot of my post-it notes! But, it was worth it! We took the last few minutes of class to review roles of the president, vice president, and cabinet members using Sticky Note Stacks. Students were each given three sticky notes and wrote two things they had learned and one question they still had about the content or something they wanted to review. Then, they worked with the people at their table to pile similar sticky notes together. One person from their table then placed their sticky notes on the board under the “we learned” column or the “still need some help with this” column. This took about 7 minutes to complete and gave me great information for our next lesson.

STOPLIGHT NAMES
I really enjoy this activity because it encourages so many awesome discussions among my students and, of course, gives me fabulous data! In our executive branch unit, students learned that our president has MANY roles that he fulfills and that they can be kind of tricky to remember. So, after Spring Break, I’ll be printing out a chart that includes all of the roles of the president. Students will grab their notes and a partner and will discuss what they remember about this learning standard. Next, they’ll write their name (or gamer tag or team name – which is always fun to come up with!) on a piece of fluorescent-colored paper and place it in the column based on their comfort level with the content. Blue paper = HELP, Petty Wap! I’m struggling! Yellow paper = ummm … this sounds familiar. Pink paper = it’s all good here! When groups have finished with their self-reflection, we’ll review as a whole class or in small groups – whatever the data shows!

I hope your Spring semester has been awesome so far and gets even better!

Thanks for reading 🙂