Classroom Glow Party

If you are looking for a cheap and simple way to promote engagement and shake things up a bit in your classroom, I would highly recommend throwing a Classroom Glow Party!

With minimal prep and cost, I hosted a Sight Word Glow Party for my first graders and their parents.  My students had previously learned over 1,000 sight words, so I felt like it was time for a celebration that they would remember.  Every Friday, we focus on learning sight words more than we do any other day of the week.  You can read more about that by clicking here.

Set Up

Do you have classroom lamps set up around your classroom?  Just swap out the light bulbs to black light bulbs and you are ready to go!  I did order a string of LED lights, as well, to hang above my white board, but you don’t have to have those to create a glow party for your classroom.  Click here if you would like to order supplies from Amazon.

I used the plastic Ikea frames with neon cardstock to write the station number and name.  The bright paper did glow under the lights so students could clearly see where the station was located.

Materials that Glow

When I first started brainstorming ideas for sight word stations and centers, I turned on the black lights and pulled things from my cabinets and storage closet.  Here are a few items that we found really glowed and worked well.

• Neon Pom Poms
• Neon Pipe Cleaners
• Bright Play-Doh
• Bright Plastic Magnetic Letters
• Snap Cubes
• Neon Cardstock
• Brightly Painted Wooden Blocks or Cubes
• Highlighters

What did the student work on?

At the beginning of the year, I assessed my students on sight words.  I then gave them five new words on index cards.  I assess them a couple times each week to add more words and review old words.  For this Classroom Glow Party, I put a small highlighter dot at the top of their new words.  This way students could quickly find the words they are to work on.  Once they completed the task for the five focus sight words, they could review old words as well.  I just wanted them to focus on the new words.

Stations

I organized my stations to last around an hour.  Students were able to rotate four times, and each rotation lasted 10 minutes.  I did not assign stations or put restrictions on where students could or could not go.  I closely monitored to make sure that students were on task and stayed in one spot the entire time.  I also invited parents to come in and work with their students on the words.

Magnetic Letter Tiles – Students used the letters to spell the sight word.  Some of the letters glowed better than others.

Play-Doh – I pulled all my bright colored Play-Doh containers out and let students roll out letters.  I also purchased Play-Doh letter stamps they could use as well.  Click here for the link to the stamps from Amazon.

Glow Sticks – I picked up a few packs of glow sticks for students to use to spell words as well.

Pom Poms – Cotton balls were a huge flop.  They didn’t glow like I expected them to or read that they would, but the neon pom poms were AWESOME!!!  I added plastic tweezers to the boxes to add a little fine motor practice as well.

Pipe Cleaners – In this station, students twisted and made letters from the pipe cleaners.  The students LOVED this station!!!  It was one of the two most popular stations that I had set up.

Highlighters – Who knew that kids loved highlighters??  This was the most popular station and the EASIEST prep!  Just throw highlighters and copy paper in a tub and go!  My more advanced students were challenged to write sentences with their words.  They loved taking the paper under a light and watching it glow.

Here is a quick video that I did for my Facebook page.  Take a look!

Other Ideas

You can use these same stations so many different ways!  You could focus on a part of speech, vocabulary words, spelling words, or even math concepts.  I hope to do math stations next 9 weeks so I’ll be sure to come back and share those ideas as well.  What ideas do you have?  Share them in the comments below!

Student Data Folders

Organizing student assessments can be challenging, but I use student data folders to help when I am tracking sight word growth and assessment checklists.  Click here to learn more.