Rule of the Room

Over a year ago, my girlfriend bought me a book called 'Pimp My Lesson'. I remember it being a while ago, as it was about the same time that OfSTED came in to see our English department. To aid my preparations, she gave me it earlier than she was going to, and I passed it on to the head of English to see if it could be of any use. She passed it back afterwards with a 'thank you' and I kept it in my bag.

I dipped in and out of the book for a long time and when Y11 had left this year I started to read it more often. I kept sticky notes inside it and made notes as I read and I'm yet to go back through this, but two of the smaller items on my to do list for this summer were to create a new lesson template loosely based on the cricket and to design a logo for 'Rule of the Room' for when I want to use it as a plenary.

Here is my logo:

I'm sure that many of you know what 'Rule of the Room' is, but it was new to me and I used it as a round in my end of year quiz for the kids assigning a different number of points for 4 different instructions (1 point for multiples, 2 points for responses in French, 3 points for redirecting all questions to another students, 4 points for responses being students' favourite song lyrics).

A student is sent from the room and all students in the room are told that the student sent out is to ask them questions - they can ask whoever they want, whatever they want, but that responses to their questions must follow the 'Rule of the Room'. The student sent out is invited back and told to ask questions and when they have an idea of what the rule was they are to guess.

In the quiz, multiples was done with ease, as was French. The redirection took a little more time and most teams picked up 2 or 3 points for song lyrics as they happened to guess particular songs. I think that the opportunities for a bit of fun as well as consolidating understanding are endless. These are a few of my thoughts:

• Multiples - multiples of 3, multiples of 5, etc.
• Factors - factors of 24, factors of 12, etc.
• Shapes - names of quadrilaterals, properties of triangles, etc.
• Prime numbers.
• Square numbers.
• The language of chance.