At the time of writing we are getting closer and closer to the Christmas holidays. The cold, short days and holiday preparations take their toll on students and teachers. People are getting tired and with the two-week school break approaching it is tempting to just put on a dvd or log in to Netflix and call it a listening activity.
But what if we can find a way to bring the Christmas spirit into the classroom without the help of a Christmas film? When asked what students enjoy most about Christmas with their families, many students mention playing games with their loved ones and enjoying each other’s company. Now I am not one to leave a suggestion like that go unnoticed. And because my students were sitting a vocabulary test I dusted off the old 30 seconds vocabulary revision game. Let’s play!
The Basics
Level: B1-C2 (Pre-Intermediate, Intermediate, Upper-intermediate, Advanced)
Focus: Revising vocabulary, speaking, listening
Time: 20-30 minutes
Materials: Vocabulary list, palm-sized cards (or let your students cut these), timers or stopwatches
Aim
Students revise their vocabulary. This can be done either before a test or after you have set some vocabulary revision homework.
The task
30 seconds is a family board game in which two or more teams of 2-4 people battle against each other. One member of the team pulls a card from the deck and gets 30 seconds to describe to their team the five words or terms that are listed on the card. The word itself or translations thereof cannot be used. For each correct guess the team gets a point. When the 30 seconds are up the turn goes to the next team. The team with the most points wins the game. (In this instance I don’t use the board itself. It does not add much to the gameplay in my opinion)
If you want to get started quickly you can make the cards yourself beforehand and skip to step 4. However, if you’re more like me, you make your students do the hard work.
- Explain the game to students that have never done the game before. You might want to model it the first time.
- Give your students an empty card.
- Instruct them to write down five words from their vocabulary list on the card and return them to you once they are finished.
- Divide the class into teams and put them around a set of tables shoved together.
- Put the stack of cards in the middle and provide a timer (or let the students use the timer on their phones)
- Let them play and enjoy the scene.
Additional ideas
With a larger group of students you will find it works better to divide the group into smaller groups of a maximum of ten students. When this is the case you will need as many sets of cards as you have groups of students. This is easily done by asking students to not make one but two or three cards. The students can give these back to you and you divide the cards into two or more stacks, creating two or more game sets.
Depending on the amount of words they had to study you can ask them to make two of the same cards or two different cards.
If you want an even distribution of the words between students you can assign them units or pages of vocabulary.
If you have a pre-intermediate group or a group who finds it difficult to describe vocabulary in the target language you could give them more time to describe the terms. Note, however, that if you allow them too much time, the pressure of the game subsides and the stress factor, which makes it fun, is taken out.
Of course you can save the sets of cards to play in future. It saves you time when you want to play it with another class next week, next semester or next year.
Over to you: Do you ever use family games in your classroom?
Have fun teaching! ^_^
Love,
Astrid
Exciting English 