Centers a great place for students to focus in on one concept of a lesson. One of the biggest benefits of centers is it allows students to get up, move around, and work with a variety of ideas. While this is fantastic, our math and literacy centers can sometimes get a little, well drab. To help liven up your literacy and math stations again, gamify them with Boom Cards.
Boom Cards is an online app that self-grades students and sends data to teachers. Wait, what? Yes, you read that right Boom Cards take some of the grading off your plate AND gives you data. So how do these boom cards work? I’m glad you asked!
Starting Off
To begin you will need to get a Boom Account. There is a free version of Boom. However, there are very affordable bundles that allow you to do so much more. You can read more about the membership options which range from 0 to 35 dollars per year.
Personally, I think buying a membership is 100% worth it! Next, you can start creating and buying Boom Decks for your students.
To help liven up your literacy and math stations again gamify them with Boom Cards. Click To Tweet
Creating a Boom Deck
In the Decks Development box, click on “create a new deck.” You will get a “Template” screen that pops up with a quick tutorial which will show you how to create your deck.
Overall, you will use your widget bar to create a deck of cards with whatever content you want. You will make several different “cards” for a deck and put the correct answer on each card using the “Answer Bar”.
What Content Do Boom Decks have?
A Boom Deck can be about literally anything!
- Fractions
- Long and short vowel sounds
- Correct Sentences
- Vocabulary Words
- Sight Words
- Spelling Words
The list really goes on and on. If you don’t feel comfortable making your own Boom Deck, you can purchase Boom Decks as well from people on TpT or on the website itself.
Teacher Benefits of Boom Decks
Boom Decks are a great tool to use in your classroom. They are also an
- Paper
- Everything is online so you don’t have to make copies of anything which helps create less clutter in your classroom.
- Copying
- Because there is no paper you don’t have to wait in line for the copier.
- Grading
- Boom Decks grades everything for you as students complete the exercises; therefore, you don’t have to do it
afterwards .
- Boom Decks grades everything for you as students complete the exercises; therefore, you don’t have to do it
- Charting
- With a paid membership, Boom Decks will show the teacher data about how well the students are doing. This is great for data retreats and goal setting.
Boom Decks takes all the “extra” work out of reviewing with your students. In addition to Boom Decks being great for teachers, it is also great for students.
Student Benefits of Boom Decks
Boom Decks help students in a variety of ways.
It builds on needed skills.
- Because you have to give students a pin to get into a Boom Deck, you can give each student the pin they need for the deck you assigned to him/her.
- Each of our students is different and some take longer to figure out what a long e sound is or how to add fractions together.
- With Boom Decks, you can strengthen your basic skills and once they are mastered you can move on to higher level thinking decks.
Boom Decks helps to review a variety of ideas.
- Boom Decks are great at reviewing after a long weekend, a couple of snow days, or a scheduled break. We want our students to retain information for a long period of time.
- By using Boom Decks, you give students a chance to brush up on past skills to prevent regression and having to reteach.
It’s a fun tool to use.
- Sitting in a desk all day doing worksheet after worksheet is trying on kids especially those who are in elementary school.
- By using Boom Decks, you are getting students up and moving to different centers and working on skills they need to understand or go forward in their education.
- Students may dread centers because they are tired of doing the same old thing but that goes away when there’s always a new game to play.
Whether you are looking for something new to add to your centers or just a “filler” for when you have a little too much time before lunch or recess, Boom Decks is a great tool to use.
You are pumping up those basic skills making them big and strong while working on harder concepts. No matter what the goal is, Boom Decks can help rock your centers and your classroom.
