Add Movement and Excitement to Your Middle School ELA Classroom with Trashketball Games

Trashketball is a classic game that is easy to set up in your ELA classroom. While you can adjust the rules for your class, the basic rules are simple. Divide the classroom into groups to answer questions. Their score is based on shooting accuracy or missing baskets. 

Getting Started

Trashketball is great as a review game. This works best right before a test or quiz over standards or as a quick way to determine mastery to see if students need additional lessons before a quiz. Trashketball works great as a novel review or basic ELA standards (locating subject/predicate of a sentence, subject-verb agreement, capitalization, active and passive voice, etc). 

Questions can be open-ended, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, or multiple choice.

You can easily make your own questions to adjust the questions to your specific students, or you can find tons on TeachersPayTeachers.

Materials you will need: three lines at varying distances from the trash can, trash can, balls of crumpled paper, rules for students, questions to ask.

Capitalization Errors in Sentences Trashketball ELA Game

Set up your classroom.

To set up your room, you will need minimal props. First, you will need tape. You will use this tape to mark three shooting lines in your classroom. The 1 point shot will be easier to make than the 3 point shot. Second, you will need a trash can from your classroom. *Affiliate links* Last, you will need crumpled paper for each group. 

Divide students into equal groups usually of 3-4 students. I have found that smaller teams work best. Each team can first decide on a name, and you should create a scoreboard somewhere in your classroom to keep track of scores. If I have a new student that missed all instruction, I will ask them to be the official scorekeeper. 

Some fun background music helps build excitement!

Game time.

This game will alternate players between answering ELA questions and shooting hoops. 

1. Choose an ELA skill to practice. 
2. Create problems in PowerPoint or Google Slide to be able to display to the class.
3. Set up classroom and gather materials.
4. Create groups.
5. Review rules (there are many variations of this game). 
6. Display the first round of questions. I like to display 5 questions for each round. Once all 5 questions are correct, the student is able to shoot the basket. If they get one or more incorrect, they return to their group to solve the questions again.
7. Have a reward for the winning team. This doesn't have to be a tangible award. You can have a sign & take their picture to blast on your school's social media pages. You can award bonus points on an assignment. You can even allow them a few minutes of free time.

If you are looking to add fun and movement to your ELA classroom, trashketball is a great game to try.

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