Class pair game
I like ALT lessons that are versatile enough to use at a variety of age levels. My JTE teaching colleague introduced this game to me. She in turn was told about it by an ALT she used to work with. It may well be popular in some ALT circles but I hadn't heard about it before. It is perhaps a bit complex for younger students but I have played it with both grades 5 and 6 as one of our elementary lessons. It also works well at junior high school and can be used for a variety of vocabulary and grammar. This game can be used for between 20 minutes to a whole lesson if you are introducing new words.
I don't really have a good name for this game. We just refer to it as that game. It can be used to teach/reinforce any vocabulary or grammar you fancy. Using it at elementary school we were practicing fruits. At junior high it could be used for verb conjugation, etc.
Pre-teach: First we introduce the language we want the kids to use during the game. In our fruit lesson this simply involved us getting our realia and flash cards out. Once we'd practiced the vocab we moved into the game.
How to play: Students play this game in teams of two. Each pair sits together, e.g.
XX XX Last
XX XX XX
XX XX XX
XX XX XX
First XX XX
The aim of the game is to be the pair sitting in First position. Pairs get relegated to Last position if they are too slow in answering, too noisy when it's not their turn, or any other rule you can think of.
Playing with fruit, each group of tables is a particular fruit. So when students move, the fruit they call out changes too. The First pair starts. The student on the left calls out the name of their fruit in English. The other student calls out another fruit name in Japanese, e.g. orange - リンゴ. This puts the pressure on the apple group. The left apple student calls out apple and the right student of the pair calls out another fruit in Japanese. And so it goes on.
As mentioned above, if a group is too slow, too noisy when it's not their turn, calls out in Japanese when they should call out in English (or vice versa), calls out the name of a fruit that isn't in the game, etc. they are out and have to move to the Last position. Then all groups behind the group who is out move up one place.
The game continues in this fashion. You can extend things by having the students swap from right to left.
To use the game at junior high school, you could use irregular verbs for example. One side calls out the past tense of their verb and the other student calls out the present tense of the verb of another group, etc.
The elementary kids I have used this with get pretty excited about things. Our fifth graders were so noisy that we had to keep calling groups out for their rowdy behaviour.
I'll post some pictures in the near future showing the layout of our classroom.
23.06.2009. 21:32
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