LOL: Bringing Joy and Skill-Building into the Classroom
How learning, at its best, can be both meaningful and fun.
The LOL project is a joyful way to bring laughter into learning while helping students develop essential presentation skills. Each student chooses and shares an age-appropriate joke with the class. At first glance, it may seem like a playful routine, but the learning runs much deeper.
Humour provides a safe entry point for building confidence and community. By taking the stage one at a time, students learn to prepare and deliver material while practicing:
Comedic Timing: Discovering the power of pause and delivery in making an audience laugh.
Presentation Skills: Using voice, expression, and body language to engage listeners.
Organization: Planning ahead, structuring content, and managing stage presence.
As jokes are shared over time, students begin to unpack the elements of humour. Together, the class can co-construct a framework for what makes something funny, whether it’s: wordplay, exaggeration, surprise, or cultural references.
A powerful dimension of LOL is that students are welcome to share jokes in their first language. While humour sometimes gets “lost in translation,” these moments create rich opportunities to notice how language and culture shape meaning. What makes one group laugh may not land the same way with another, and those differences spark conversations about audience, context, and perspective.
In weaving laughter into the daily rhythm of the classroom, LOL reminds us that joy and rigour can coexist. Students aren’t just telling jokes; they’re learning to communicate with impact, listen attentively, and appreciate the ways humour connects us across cultures.
With a simple, shared laugh, the classroom becomes a place where skills grow alongside smiles and where students discover that learning, at its best, can be both meaningful and fun.
How to Launch LOL in Your Classroom
Introduce the Routine: Explain the project to students and model by sharing a joke yourself. Decide if you are using this process to construct an understanding of humour before launching a unit based on this or if you are doing this purely for skills building and shared community experiences.
Create a Schedule: Students choose when they want to present within that timeline- aim for no more than 3 joke-tellers in one school day, but not three in a row.
Discuss Guidelines: Co-construct criteria for jokes: age-appropriate, inclusive, and respectful of different cultures.
Build a Framework Together: After a few weeks, reflect on what makes jokes work—timing, wordplay, exaggeration, surprise, or cultural context.
Encourage Multilingual Moments: Invite students to tell jokes in their first language and discuss how humour shifts across languages. Have Google translate on so students can see the translation.
Use Reflection as a Learning Tool: After students share their joke, they have a reflection form that asks them to self-evaluate how their joke went over and how they would do it if they were given a take 2. This gives students immediate ownership of their next steps before they receive the teacher’s evaluation rubric, which they can use to complete the Statement of Ownership (So) that is required after every BOB project.
Celebrate Growth: Highlight not just the laughs, but the skills: confidence, timing, and communication- that students develop along the way.
The LOL project is a reminder that humour is not just entertainment; it’s a powerful way to learn, connect, and grow together.
