Rooster Games 2017

On Friday our fourth graders participated in the 9th Annual Ashaway School Rooster Games!  All of the students who read at least five of the books on the list of nominees for the Rhode Island Children's Book Award were invited to participate.  The six teams (each a mix of boys and girls from both fourth grade classrooms) competed in a variety of games that were based on books from the list.

Rooster Games Champion Readers!

I had five students who earned special recognition by reading all 15 of the RICBA nominees that I bought for Ashaway School.  I started off the games by awarding Champion Reader medals to these students!

Two of the games are set up on Google Slides.  They are projected onto the large screen above the stage, and the students collaborate with their teammates to come up with the answers.  Then they use marker boards to display them and earn points.
 


  
Students match pictures from each book to their titles in the Illustration Round, and they answer multiple choice and short answer questions in the Question Round. 

 

For the "table top" rounds, the teams are matching the book titles to characters, settings, objects and the first lines of the books they come from.

Character Round

First Lines Round

Object Round

Settings Round

  

One of the RICBA titles, A Whole New Ballgame, inspired this year's reading relays: A Whole New BALLOON Game!  The first two games involved passing a balloon down the line of team members.  For "Hoops" one student passed the balloon up and down through hoops created by the team's arms, and for "Crabs" all the students passed the balloon down their line using only their elbows!

The last balloon game was the "Frenzy".   All of the students stood in the middle of the gym and the chaperones lined up on one side.  Then the grown-ups started tossing balloons to the kids who had to get the balloons to the opposite side by batting them with their hands.  

Any balloons that hit the floor were "out".  All the ones that made it all the way across were collected, then popped!  Inside every balloon was a slip of paper with a team's name written on it, and each team called earned a bonus point.  (There were 36 balloons so each team had 6 balloons with their names inside.)   There was almost as much excitement when I read the names out loud as there was when they were playing the game!

This year I also added an additional game: Charades!  This was a round that the teams could work on as they finished the table top games.  I had been worried that they'd be watching the other teams to get hints on the answers, but it turned out that they were all laser-focused on their own "actors".  

This year our Rooster Games winners were Team Red, Team Green, and Team Blue!  Yup, a three-way tie!  There's no prize for winning the Rooster Games, but at the end of the day all of the students who qualified to participate in the games gets to enjoy a pizza party sponsored by our P.T.O., so they truly are all winners!

      It was a really fun event, and it couldn't have happened without the support of our fourth grade teachers, our parent volunteers, and our Ashaway School P.T.O.  My sincerest thanks go out to them all!