In my first teaching role, in discussions with a colleague I learned about an activity she used successfully with junior year students which she called The Amazing Race.

The activity consists of five sub activities which in pairs or threes need to be correctly solved before the teacher releases a secret letter. Once all the activities are completed and the 5 or 6 letters are issued, students unscramble to letters to reveal the secret word and win the prize.

My colleague used the Amazing Race in final period lessons where students needed an activity that felt less like content and more like fun. The great thing about this activity, which I experienced first hand, is the enthusiasm students bring and the way learning can be embedded subtly.

I used this activity on the final day of term and it truly was Amazing. Perhaps the lure of a prize helped but more than that, the students enjoyed rising to the challenge, keeping their work top secret, and using different strategies in their teams to try to finish first. All teams completed the activity in the lesson which was more than I could have achieved in a content driven lesson on the final day.

Incidentally, the secret word I gave them to unscramble was “STARS” and I got a few smiles from students when they figured it out.

The activity documents issued to students are shown below.

https://deborahcranston.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Clue-sheet-Amazing-Race-activity.pdf

https://deborahcranston.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Amazing-race-activity.pdf

In my first teaching role, in a Year 8 geography class, I incorporated an activity in which rather than reading the article below to consider SEEP (social, economic, environmental and political) criteria, I converted the article into a Synthesia AI Video for students to watch.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/may/29/hollywood-and-homelessness-the-two-sides-of-byron-bay

A screen shot of the Synthesia video is shown below

This opened up discussion as many students were shocked the video was made using AI. We discussed how we need to be very careful with what we see presented to us now because really polished videos like this can be prepared in a half an hour.

We later used Synthesia to create an exam revision video of an activity the students completed in class.

In my first teaching role I worked part time, job sharing across five lines. My job share partner and I used a spreadsheet to plan the lessons. I also used this to communicate essential information about how the lessons went so we could coordinate effectively.

In my first teaching role, I prepared some “getting to know student” exit tickets and I used these as backups. On occasion, I would pivot from a planned exit ticket and use these ones instead. I would do this if we had less or more time than I anticipated or if I felt that the students were too fatigued to benefit from a content related exit ticket.

I found these exit tickets really valuable in supporting rapport. The year 8 students in particular really appreciated being asked what worked for them. I not only learned a lot from the exit tickets, but it gave me valuable information about student preferences to incorporate student voice and choice in the activities, where possible.

In my first teaching role, seating plans were not compulsory but after a particularly disrupted lesson in which we did not finish getting through all the content, I implemented a strategy with the year 8 students which I learned during an observation in my second practicum.

This strategy allowed students to begin the lesson in their chosen seating plan. During the lesson, students would be given three chances which were written on the whiteboard at the beginning of the lesson and were rubbed out each time I had to wait more than a reasonable time to regroup the class. If all three chances were rubbed off the whiteboard, we would revert to Seating plan 2. I only had to put the students into the second seating plan on two occasions but knowing it would happen was an effective strategy in keeping the class on task.

In my first teaching role, I gained valuable experience of the value of pastoral classes to support student safety, belonging and connection. One of the challenges in these short 20 minute segment classes was to overcome student reluctance to interact with students outside their immediate social group. During these classes we sometimes had life skills activities to go through with the students. At other times, we as teachers could use our initiative to develop our own activities.

One strategy I used was to incorporate games and other activities, some samples of which are shown below to support student interaction.

The next activity followed on from a Blooket in which students had to guess random facts about me.