How to Run a Classroom Challenge to Boost ELA Engagement

Why Run a Classroom Challenge in ELA?

Running a challenge in your classroom can be both exciting and motivating for your students. Challenges can be used to strengthen academic skills, promote creativity, or encourage teamwork. A well-designed challenge can contribute to a positive learning environment and even boost students’ confidence. Let’s dive into how you can organize and run a successful challenge for your students in grades 6–12.

Step 1: Clarify Learning Goals

Before you start your challenge, you need to clarify what your goals are. In this challenge, what do you want your students to achieve? Keeping a clear goal will help keep your students on track. Here are some examples:

• Improve students’ writing skills
• Enhancing reading comprehension
• Building critical thinking
• Fostering collaboration

Step 2: Plan Your Challenge

After you have defined the goals, you are ready to choose the type of challenge you are going to do. The format can vary based on your class size and resources. Here are some examples of challenge types you can run with your students in grades 6–12:

Writing Challenges

• Short Story Series: Challenge your students to complete short stories. Provide them with a theme, prompt, or opening line to get their ideas flowing.
• Picture Prompts Playoffs: Challenge your students to find a picture and write about it. Find photos that your students can put on their creative thinking hats and write a story about the photo they chose.
• Essay Extravaganza: Challenge your students to write a persuasive essay. Gather questions that your students can pull from to write their essays.

Reading Challenges

• Book Bingo: Provide a bingo card to your students that allows them to mark different books they have read. Ex: Mystery, Enviromental Issues, Based in Another Country, Award Winning Authors.
• Literature Circles: Assign students to a team. Provide students with a book to read and have them create a presentation to share with the class.

Other Challenges

• Individual Quiz-based: Students can aim to reach a certain score as you review skills.
• Group Teamwork Challenge: Divide your students into teams and assign them a series of tasks or a project to complete.
• Long Term: Track the number of pages or books your students read over a certain period of time.

Step 3: Share Expectations with Students

For your challenge to run smoothly, you will need to create rules and expectations. Share the expectations with your students ahead of time.

• Time Limits: Set deadlines for your students to keep them focused. For longer challenges, you can set reminders to help your students stay on track.
• Eligibility: Can all students participate?
• Scoring: How are you going to keep score? Are there quiz scores, peer evaluation, or judges?

Step 4: Motivate Students with Rewards and Recognition

To help your students get excited for the challenge, prizes are a great way to help keep your students invested. Think about what prizes can resonate with your students. Some ideas are:

• Trophies or medals: These are tangible reminders of their accomplishments.
• Gift Cards: A small gift card to local stores. You can even reach out to your community for donations!
• Homework passes or extra credit: All students love a no homework night; this is a great one to reward your winners.
• School Recognition: Winners’ names can be displayed throughout the school to show their accomplishments.

Step 5: Promote Your Challenge to Students

Now, you are ready to promote your classroom challenge! The promotion is a great way to get your students excited and motivated for the challenge.

• Class Announcements: Post and share with your class during your announcement time.
• Poster: Create a poster that shares the deadline, prizes, and rules for your students to see.

Achieve3000 Literacy Users: Here’s How to Run a Challenge with the Program!

Let’s put it into action with Achieve3000 Literacy! Achieve3000 Literacy is a powerful tool that helps students develop literacy skills by providing differentiated content based on each student’s reading level. Here is how to run a challenge for Achieve3000 Literacy in your classroom:

Goals

• Complete 2 Achieve3000 Literacy lessons per week
• Activity score of 75% or higher

When students complete two lessons a week and get a score of 75% or higher, they will be given a raffle ticket to be entered into a weekly drawing for a chance to win a prize.

Items needed:

• Student Tracker
• Raffle Tickets
• Student Prizes
• Student Certificate

Get Started

First, pick the dates you would like to run your challenge. Second, display the challenge around your room. Share the challenge with your students and explain what they need to do to be entered to win a prize. Third, create a tracker for your students to put their lesson scores on each week.

Week 1: Inform your students that the challenge has started. Review the rules and encourage your students to start tracking their lessons and scores.

Week 2: Log in to your Achieve3000 Literacy teacher portal. Click on the data center icon to enter the dashboard. On the top left, click on class overview. You can adjust the dates at the top to filter the dates on which you are running the challenge. You will now see a list of your students with the number of lessons they have completed and the scores they received. Award a raffle ticket to any student that has completed two lessons and scored 75% or higher. If a student went above and beyond and finished four lessons with a 75% or higher, give that student two raffle tickets.

Have students put their tickets into a box, jar, or bowl and pick a winner! The winner will get to choose a prize.

Week 2–4: Repeat. Celebrate your first winner and then remind your students of the goals and rules. You can remind students that Achieve3000 Literacy lessons can be done anytime, even after school hours! Any lesson they finish will count towards the drawing.

Each Monday, distribute the raffle tickets to the students and find a winner!

Week 5: Now that your challenge is over, let’s recognize everyone’s work within Achieve3000 Literacy. Give each student a certificate of achievement for all the lessons they completed in Achieve3000 Literacy. At this time, you can even give a prize to the students who completed the most lessons, had the highest average score, or had the most Lexile growth.

Have fun with your challenge! Learn more about Achieve3000 Literacy HERE.