Do you need a fun and engaging way to review and practice some of the skills you’ve been working on this year? Give skill surgery a try! Your students will have so much fun performing surgical procedures with the skills they’ve been building all year long. I’m going to share some tips and resources to help you put together this fun review activity for your students. It’s a great way to celebrate everything your students have learned while creating a special end-of-the-year memory together.
Preparing for Skill Surgery
Creating a fun day of themed learning doesn’t have to be over-the-top or complicated! All you need are themed review activities for students to rotate through as different learning stations. If you already have a centers rotation set up in your classroom, it’s an easy swap!
However, if you want to add some extra surgical touches to the day, here are some additional (optional) ideas:
- You could wear scrubs or a white lab coat to set the tone for the activity.
- You can have students wear white coats to help them embrace their new role as surgeons.
- Students can create their own surgical headwear with white and gray construction paper.
- To make students feel even more official, try assembling the recording sheets into a surgical chart. You can staple the worksheets into a file folder or a large piece of construction paper folded in half.
- You could add table covers and themed labels to your stations to set them apart from your regular centers rotations.
No matter how you decide to set up your classroom for this review activity, your students will be so excited to become surgeons for the day!
Skill Surgery Stations
Once you have everything set up and ready to go, it’s time for the students to rotate through the skill surgery stations! Here are some activity ideas that you can use to set up the rotations in your own classroom.
Silly Sums
Give your budding surgeons some addition equations that need a bit of help. Each equation has an extra addend that doesn’t belong!
Students will diagnose the problem with the equation, extract the unnecessary addend, and stitch the equation back together onto a recording sheet.
Punctuation Problem
You can also help your students review punctuation with a surgical twist! Give your students sentence strips that have all three types of punctuation at the end. Students will read the sentence to decide which punctuation mark it needs.
Once they have it figured out, they will prescribe the correct punctuation by cutting it out and adding it to the sentence on the recording sheet.
Tangled Sentences
This station will help your students work on their sentence formation skills. They will be given sentences that are out of order and contain an extra word. The first task will be for the surgeons to figure out the correct order of the sentence. They can use the capitalization and punctuation as clues to help them!
As they work to put the sentence in order, they will also need to identify the extra word. Once they have extracted the extra word, they will stitch the sentence back together.
Contraction Action
Could your students use some review with creating contractions? In the Contraction Action station, the surgeons will need to determine the best course of treatment for two words that need to become a contraction.
Your students can extract the extra letters and then stitch the remaining letters together to form a contraction.
Doctor Bag for House Calls
You can also use this day of themed learning to prepare your students for skill practice at home during the summer. Your students can create a doctor bag to use for house calls!
The doctor bag includes four review games, which students can put together across four different stations.
- Sum Problems – Students will use this activity to practice their addition fluency.
- Contraction Action – This review game can be played like concentration, which students matching the contraction to its corresponding word pairs.
- Punctuation Problem – Students will read the sentences and decide which punctuation is missing.
- Tangled Sentences – Students will match two strips to create a complete sentence.
If they finish cutting out the game pieces before it’s time to move on to the next station, students can practice playing the game.
Once the games are complete, students can place them in a doctor bag craft and take them home. They’ll be excited to play these review activities with their families over and over again! This will help them keep their literacy and math skills sharp over summer vacation.
OPERATION Review
If you need another station for your day of skill surgery, you can play the board game OPERATION together as a review activity! You can ask the students skill-based questions one at a time. If they answer the question correctly, they can extract a bone from the patient. This review activity can be one that you or another classroom helper can supervise during the stations or during some other small group instructional time.
Printable Skill Surgery Review Activity
Would you like to try a day of skill surgery in your classroom this spring? I’ve put together a resource that makes it easy for you to set up this review activity for your students!
This easy-to-prep resource includes everything you need for skill surgery: Printable activities, table markers, take-home activities, craft templates, and helpful tips. This resource is designed to make it easy to set up a fun and engaging end-of-the-year review activity for your students.
You can find the Skill Surgery Review Activity in my TPT store if you’d like to take a closer look at everything included in this printable resource.
Save This Review Activity Idea
Be sure to save this skill surgery activity if you want to come back to it later! Just add the pin below to your favorite Pinterest board. You’ll be able to quickly find this fun review activity when you’re looking for a way to keep your students engaged in skill practice at the end of the year.
