I created the Survivor game after my first year of teaching. The students and I found ourselves/myself looking forward to class each day despite a countdown to summer. Students that were once disengaged wanted in on the action. See the attached PowerPoint for more info and the attached documents: Survivor_Certificate; Survival_Team Place Markers; Survival Supplies
Setting up:
-Create teams of three. Each team should have an even ability level
-Using a large sheet of paper (like the gigantic teaching Post-It papers) divide up poster into about 8 even sections. Each section represents a health level (more on that later)
-Print Team cards numbered 1-10 (for a class of about 30) and use poster-tack to stick each Team card to Health Level 1
-Create a few Calamity cards (similar to the game Oregon Trail) that depict true disastrous events that could happen while surviving on a tropical island. As in the game, Oregon Trail, be sure create calamity cards that use the supplies the supplies provided to the students.
-Print the supply list on different colored paper (i.e. Water Bottle, Granola and Beef Jerky on Yellow paper; Tarp, Netting, Paracord on blue paper; and Matches and Medicine on green paper). Put the three groups of supplies into buckets for students to grab when they have earned a supply and for students to return a supply for calamity cards.
How it works:
Students have to earn a supply or supplies each day. Students can do that through Exit Tickets (in which individual team members are held accountable for their learning) or by having a group complete a task/assignment as a group. Then at the beginning of class, a calamity card is read. If a group doesn’t have that supply, they go down a health level. At the end of the few weeks/end of the school year, the team or teams at the highest health level can get a prize (i.e. can leave class early, homework pass on a missing assignment, or a food-related prize).