There are few tangible items in my teaching kit that I find more reliable than a good old sticky ball. It costs only pennies, requires no electronics, takes up almost zero space, brings joy to a joyless class, and is a reliable fallback activity if all else fails. I can not tell you the numbers of time this seemingly small piece of plastic has pulled a class together.
The wonders of the sticky ball were first shown to me when I was teaching in a small rice farming village in a province outside of Ha Noi, Vietnam. There were no computers, no projectors, and often no electricity. Nearly all audio recordings were delivered on a portable boombox, and videos were shown on a small portable laptop. It was a modern teacher’s nightmare. For me, though, it was a blessing from on high. As a rookie teacher, it was baptism by fire. I had to learn on the fly. Constantly I had to remind myself, “This is how my parents learned, so clearly it can be done.”
My only lifeline was a veteran teaching assistant, a kind a patient woman who would kindly offer me a helping hand when she saw I was floundering. On one occasion, where I was particularly drowning in my ineptitude, she reached into her bag of tricks and handed me a sticky ball. She then walked up to the board, drew a big target and numbered each concentric ring like a dart board. Turning around she called out “What country is this?” while holding up a flashcard of the Australian flag.
Hands flew up across the class room. She called on a student, then asked that student a series of questions that required them to use the sentence structures that we had practiced. After the student answered three to four questions, the teacher walked over to me took the sticky ball out of my hand and gave it to the student. The student hurled it at the board and the class erupted in cheers.
Ever since that moment, I’ve come to rely on the sticky ball as a great back up activity. No matter what class I walk into, you can guarantee that I have at least one sticky ball in my backpack. I’ve even found it to useful in number of other ways:
- Pass and share (whoever has the ball gets to speak)
- Keep my ADHD students focused on me as they really want to use it
- Allow students to practice eye-hand coordination
- Practice sharing if there’re multiple sticky balls
- Teach about germs
Hopefully this was useful to folks out there. If you have any other ideas for sticky balls, please let me know, as I’d love to try them in my class.
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