Spin the Wheel: A Fun and Educational Tool for Classroom Activities

Interactive learning is a great method for improving engagement in a classroom. The classic ways of teaching in the classroom are not meant for everyone. Some students just don’t mesh well in that traditional setting.

One plausible solution to their plight is interactive learning. The thing about interactive learning is that it inconveniences no one. All children like interactive learning as it is far more engaging.

Today, we are going to check out how a specific tool can help teachers use interactive learning to make classroom activities more fun for students. That tool is the Spin the Wheel—a customizable wheel spinner that can emulate a real wheel and its randomness.

Let’s see how it aids in interactive learning.

How Wheel Spinner Can Help with Classroom Activities

Given below are some of the popular ways in which a wheel spinner can help with classroom activities.

• Interactive Quizzes

When you are teaching younger students, such as elementary students and kindergartners, interaction is key to learning. Young students have a lot of energy, and all they want to do is run around and let it out. Interactions during class activities are a great way of expending that energy without tiring them out.  

One method of using Spin the Wheel for interaction is to use it in quizzes. Instead of creating a standardized quiz with a set number of questions, teachers can use a wheel spinner.

The idea is that students only have to answer the random questions that the wheel spin selects. You can add more questions than necessary to add an element of luck to the quiz. For example, there are 15 questions on the wheel and only ten need to be answered. 

Students will be more invested in which questions they get because they feel some questions are easier.  With Spin the Wheel, you can add as many questions as you like and create interactive quizzes.

• Science Experiments

Spinning wheels are a great method of showing science and maths experiments to students. For example, when teaching color science to students, you can add the colors of the rainbow to a wheel and spin it really fast so that it appears white. This highlights the principle that white light consists of seven colors in a physical way.

In mathematics, you can showcase the concept of probability using Spin the Wheel. There are many ways a spinning wheel can be used for probability. For example, if you create equal segments and spin the wheel to see how many times the wheel stops on each segment. 

Then, the results will be compared with the theoretical calculations to show the students that probability calculations are correct.

• Choosing Homework Assignments

Homework is typically something that students are not looking forward to. You can try to make the homework assignments as engaging and creative as you want. However, there will always be some students who don’t want to do them. 

There is a way to get such students to engage with their homework. If you give them some choice between what kind of homework they want to do, they are more liable to do it. 

With Spin the Wheel, you can offer somewhat of a choice between different homework assignments. You can give students the agency to put at least one or two assignments on the wheel.

Then, spin the wheel and assign the homework that the wheel stops on. You can assign the non-chosen homework later. This gives students some motivation because they can do work that they like more.

• Selecting a Student for Classroom Roles

Most schools have students take on some extra classroom duties, such as cleaning the board after every lecture or monitoring the class in the teacher’s absence. 

Many students aspire to take on those roles (especially in smaller grades). Understandably, there may be some heated emotions among younger kids if a teacher arbitrarily chooses people for these roles.

With a wheel spinner, the teacher can delegate the arbitration to a game of chance. They can put the names of all their students on the wheel and spin it to select a student for the role. 

Of course, the next time the wheel is spun, the previously selected student’s name will be omitted for fairness. In this way, all the students can get a chance to do the extra duties without feeling as if the teacher did something unfairly.

• Making Randomized Groups for Activities

Group activities are a great way to develop social skills and promote camaraderie among students. To that end, it is desirable that students make groups with people outside of their usual circles. 

Now, if a teacher were to deliberately break up friend groups for group activities, students would feel resentment. With Spin the Wheel, it is more fun to create groups as it raises the stakes. 

Teachers can create a wheel with all the students’ names on it, and consecutive winning entries will form one group of students. Each winner would be removed from the wheel to avoid duplicates. 

Students will feel the tension and wonder if they will end up with their friends or not, and it will become a fun little activity of its own.  

Conclusion

Spin the Wheel offers many different ways to employ interactive learning and spice up classroom activities. It is a free utility and highly customizable. Teachers can use it easily on their phones or laptops. Using such tools, the atmosphere in the classroom can be vastly improved.