Post-It grids with a twist

Last week I saw this tweet from the Twitter account @Geog_HA:

It occurred to me that this great activity is a twist on Post-It grids, that I've blogged about before and which I use often in the classroom.  In fact today I did the weather one with a Year 5 class.

I had a go at doing this activity with a languages twist with one of my Year 6 classes this morning.

We've been working on infinitives in Spanish - what they are, how to identify them and how to use them.  We read them in school rules, using the book Ya voy a la escuela, sang them in a song ('Ahora vamos a cantar' from Diez Deditos) and last week used them in opinion sentences.

This morning I gave each pair of students a copy of the crowd-sourced texts using opinions and infinitives:

On the board there were 12 questions in a grid:

I gave each pair 12 post-it tabs.  I asked them to read the texts, work out the answers to the questions (using prior knowledge, their books and knowledge of cognates), write their answer (person 1-5) on their post-it tab and stick it on the question.  The board in that classroom is one of the ones like a giant TV, and one of the boys reminded me that it's very sensitive, so instead I drew a big grid on the ordinary whiteboard and we stuck the post-it tabs on there.  This turned out well as the questions weren't obscured.

I stopped the activity when all the groups had done most of them and we went through the answers.  I looked at the range of answers in each square on the board while we were going through.

Afterwards I explained to the children that this was the first time doing this activity for me, and asked them if they had enjoyed it.  They said they had - many said, "It was fun!" and added, "It was different!"  One of the boys said that he enjoyed it because he got to be out of his seat.  They were certainly all very engaged with finding the answers, and I overheard some good learning conversations about the answers.

When I do this kind of activity again, I'll find some stickier post-its (these ones had a tendency to flutter off the board!) and will also try having questions that need to be answered with a phrase or sentence rather than a number.