Jigsaw Activities-What They Are And How To Use This Amazing Tool In Your Classroom!

Have you ever heard of Jigsaw activities for the classroom? 

Jigsaw activities are a great way to get students working together to learn something new and teach their peers. 

“People learn the most by teaching others” -Peter F Drucker

Be sure to check out my Jigsaw activity Bundle by clicking here!

What are Jigsaw Activities?

A jigsaw is a collaborative activity that involves the organizing of students dependent into various groups. Students are dependent on their peers to learn a new skill, and then teach the skill to another set of peers. 

A teacher will take a topic or set of skills and break it into pieces. Students will work together to assemble the pieces to complete the task. Thus the name, Jigsaw!

Be sure to read another one of my blog posts, where I talk more about how I recycle Jigsaw activities throughout the year. Check it out by clicking here!

How do you use Jigsaw Activities in the Classroom?

1. The teacher will start by selecting a task or topic. This must be a topic that can be broken down into subtopics.
2. The teacher will then assign students into groups that we will call HOME groups. 
3. Within the Home groups, the teacher will assign each group member a number or colour. 
4. The students with the same number or colour will form new groups that we will call the EXPERT groups
5. The expert groups will research or learn a sub topic that has been assigned to them by the teacher
6. Through research and/or practical activities, students will gather information and learn as much as possible about their given topic. These findings should be documented somewhere (paper, online doc, poster, etc…)
7. Once students have been given enough time and feel that they have mastered the topic, students will regroup into their HOME groups. 
8. One at a time, students will teach their HOME group members about what they have learned. Group members should be recording this new information on the worksheet
9. (optional)Students will then complete a final task to show what they have learned

How to organize your students into Jigsaw Groups

To organize your students into groups, you must consider the following:

1. The students who will be in the EXPERT groups
2. The students who will be in the HOME groups

It can be a bit chaotic when organizing students into their EXPERT and HOME groups. 

Be sure to display the groups somewhere where students can visually see the groups.

I created a group creator to use when doing Jigsaw activities in your classroom. See it here!

Jigsaw Activity Example-Reading

One example of a Jigsaw Activity for reading could be reading skills.

Each EXPERT groups would be responsible for one of the following reading strategies:

1. Make Connections
2. Ask Questions
3. Make Inferences
4. Visualize
5. Determine important information

Students would learn about the skill through guided practice and graphic organizers.They would then use these graphic organizers to teach their HOME group members.  

Another example of EXPERT groups for a reading skill jigsaw would be different reading skills.

1. Identify main idea and details
2. Author’s purpose
3. Cause and effect
4. Compare and contrast
5. Identify point of view

Jigsaw Activities For Researching a Topic

Long gone are the days when you assign a new topic and let students research freely on their own. 

Use jigsaws to allow students to teach their peers about a topic. 

For example, let’s say you are starting a unit about the rainforest. You could have each EXPERT group research one of the following subtopics:

1. The climate of a rainforest
2. Animals of the rainforest
3. Organizations that support the preservation of the rainforest
4. Dangers to the rainforest
5. Largest rainforest locations in the world

Once students are in their HOME groups, they would teach their group members about what they learned, as well as learn from their  other group members. 

Check out my Jigsaw activity worksheets by clicking here!

Jigsaw activities for writing or grammar

Jigsaws could be easily adapted to teach students a new writing skill or grammar strategy. 

EXPERT groups could compete practical activities and exercises to learn a certain strategy, such as,

1. Sentence structures (declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory) 
2. Using prefixes and suffixes (pre-, re-, mis-, -ful, -less, -able, -ment, etc…)
3. Punctuation (commas, periods, semi-colons, quotation marks, question marks, etc…)

If using jigsaws to teach students a new grammatical or writing skill, be sure to have practical exercises, as well as graphic organizers available for students in their EXPERT groups. 

Never used jigsaws before?

Be sure to check out my Jigsaw activity bundle, where I give step-by-step instructions, worksheets and a group creator. See it by clicking here!

I would love to hear from you! Please comment below with your thoughts, concerns, questions about using jigsaw activities in your classroom!

If you’ve used jigsaws before, please let me know some ways you’ve used jigsaw activities in your classroom!