This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 67 of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast.

In this episode, I am going to share 30 incredible ideas for things you can do in your classroom

on those after testing day before vacation lame duck days of school.

I am so excited about this episode. Oh my goodness. It just started as this little idea

and now the more research I've been doing for it, the more excited I am. So, let me get started.

The term lame duck is most often used to describe a president who is still sitting in office after

his or her successor has been elected. Technically, this person is still the president, but his or her

decision making power is generally perceived to be minimal. We have something like that in school.

Those days when technically we're still in school, but because it's right before vacation,

the end of the school year is near or we're in the middle of standardized testing. Those class

hours don't have the same instructional potential as your average school day. In some cases,

like on standardized test days in certain districts, teachers are explicitly told they can't

plan regular instruction. On these lame duck days, it's hard to figure out what we can do to

still provide valuable learning experiences for our students. And then there are those small bursts

of lame duck time. The 15 minutes you have left after the fire drill, when you know you don't have

enough time to actually finish the lesson you were teaching, but you don't want to just let them

sit there. We often call the activities we need for these times sponge activities. Regardless of

what you call it or how much you need, we all have those times when students are right in front of us,

but the regularly scheduled programming just isn't going to work. What then? In some schools,

they'll still let you show movies. I worked in a place like that. Although near the end, we were

starting to get pressured to cut that out. And I understand why. As a parent, when I asked my kids

what they did in school on any given day, and I hear watched a movie, I'm annoyed. I mean,

...