If you’ve got the technology available to you, JeopardyLabs.com is a quick way to make an interactive Jeopardy game for class review. But if you need a low-tech version, this one takes about 20 minutes to create and can be reused throughout the year.

You’ll need: a piece of foam-core project board, some Velcro tape, index cards, Post-Its, and markers.

Lay out the board with however many categories you want – I used five – and create “tiles” with the index cards. Attach the velcro tape to the back of the cards and to the board, and – that’s it.

I write the categories on Post-Its, because that way I can switch them out each time I use the review game. You can also do an even more-low tech version of this idea using only Post-Its and the wall. 

Run the game just like the show, perhaps with a bit of flexibility on the “must give your answer in the form of a question” thing because you want to spend your time going through questions, not arguing about whether or not an answer was phrased correctly. If a team answers correctly, take the card off the board and hand it to them. That way, it’s easy to tally points at the end and the game flows more quickly.

If I were a better-prepared person, I’d write up the questions ahead of time, but I usually just make them up off the top of my head as we go along, making the difficulty of the question correspond to the point value.

Last – it has occurred to me today that using this game would be an easy way to involve your classroom aide in teaching. If you had the questions made up ahead of time, your aide could easily run the game. I hate it that I usually have my aide doing stuff like taking attendance and passing out papers and don’t find more ways to have her actually leading the class.

You can find more great review games at The Religion Teacher’s 7 Ways to Review for a Test and on CatholicMom.com,

Catechist Chat will be an ongoing series of posts for teachers in religious education programs. It is based on my personal experience and not on any statistical evidence of the effectiveness of my advice. Suscribe to my feed to follow along, and Caveat lector, which is Latin for “your mileage may vary.” 

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