The Wild Card Review

Be the wild Card

Think about the last time you heard a student beg to go inside from recess or not want to go out because he/she is so excited to be doing whatever activity you have going on in class. That's one of the best feelings a teacher can have...to hear your students beg to learn more. If we are honest, it probably doesn't happen as often as we'd like. So, how can we increase the amount of times we hear that? Enter, the book The Wild Card. It's a new best-selling book by Hope and Wade King. They are married teacher powerhouses that teach together at the famous Ron Clark Academy. 

This book is a game changer for student engagement. There is so much creativity in this book. My favorite topic is covered (as a means for engagement is room transformations). For several years, I created an extensive classroom theme for the year. Students looked forward to it and could not wait until my classroom reveal each year. Past students loved to look in during the first week of school to see what the theme was for the current year. 

This year, I decided to do something different. I was trading classrooms and starting to teach a new grade level. I decided to keep things super simple by going with a theme based on some basic colors instead and just throwing in a few accents of llamas...one of my current favorites. The excited feeling of a theme was a once-a-year thing. But what if you could create that feeling more often, throughout the year at unexpected times?

So in their book, Hope and Wade both have amazing classroom themes, but beyond that, they incorporate special themes throughout the year by creating temporary room transformations. I ABSOLUTELY love this model as a way to shake things up within the classroom and create a sense of excitement. 

I have used a few of their ideas inside the walls of my own classroom. Some of the transformations I have created have been: 
1) a chemistry carnival to celebrate our learning during a unit on states of matter
2) a surgery room during our unit on contractions: students operated on words by performing surgery and taking out some letters to create a new word that was a contraction. Words were tied together with apostrophes they wrote on bandaids.
Some other room transformations that I have also done are:
1) A Greek day during our study on the summer olympics. Students were invited to dress in togas and we spent the day learning about the culture of the ancient Greeks. You can see that over here.  
2) My most recent transformation was my football transformation. I created a football theme that took a bit of time but was pretty easy. We used it to review content on a 1/2 day.

One of the things that Hope and Wade talk about in their book is to create excitement by being unpredictable. When they don't know what to expect (especially on the delivery of the content) the students will be excited to enter your classroom each day. So I encourage you to reach for this book. You will not be able to put it down. It has so many practical ways that you can change things up in your classroom to create an atmosphere of engagement. And when you have engagement, the students WILL want to learn.