In the upper school, many students really enjoy the creative writing/storytelling games/activities outlined in Paul Matthews’ book, “Sing me the Creation: Creative Writing Sourcebook”… They’re a lot of fun and tend to get students to overcome their reservations and speak or write freely. Also, transferring any sort of grammar revision into pair work, in which silly or incongruous words have to be spontaneously built into sentences / a story … But are those types of games ‘relevant’ in terms of media?
When doing newspaper work, games which involve matching silly/absurd/incongruous headlines to their pictures can be fun. Later, students can draft the article which they imagine belong to the picture and headline (and then perhaps compare them to the actual article).
To my mind games are more important than ever because they bring the students into direct interactivity. They can act and speak spontaneously without intelectual demand.
In a French lesson in class 9 we played the very popular game “To pack one’s bags” and I was impressed by the pupil’s memory: a class of 32 pupils packed the whole bag without failing!
An interesting game for younger students might also be “Dobble”. It´s a guessing game and has very easy rules. I used to play it with a little girl who didn`t speak a lot of german and she loved it. 🙂
Throw the dice and say the matching number. Keep going until you have said all numbers! Add the numbers or subtract the number of a second dice!!! It’s fun.
We used to play “Did you pinch me?”- Five pupils stand in front of the class, they´re the “pinchers”. Teacher says “Heads down, thumbs up!” Then everybody lays down his/her head on the table, putting up one thumb. The pinchers walk around and pick one Person which they pinch in the thumb. after they picked one they go back to the front and wait until all the pinchers are done. The teacher (watching everything) says: “Heads up” and the Five “pinched ones” stand up. Then they ask one Person they suspect being the one who pinched him/her: “did you pinch me?”.The answer can be adapted to the Level of the class. If he/she guessed right, the pincher is demasked and has to sit down.
The game is nice to practise the simple past.
I´m super exited about all your ideas, making notes like a crazy Person.. thank you!!
I am not teaching yet either, but I would like to share the experience of playing “Activity” with my family. “Activity” is a board game where you have cards with different topics the others players have to guess. You usually play it in teams. You move from field to field and have to either describe a certain term with other words (like Taboo) or paint or mime it. The latter is always very funny and something teenager are rather good at.
I would not play a Board game in class but the painting of terms (like “Montagsmaler” ) could be done in small groups while miming is something for the whole class.
I am not teaching yet either, but I would like to share the game “Activity”.
“Activity” is a board game where you have cards with different topics the others players have to guess. You usually play it in teams. You move from field to field and have to either describe a certain term with other words (like Taboo) or paint or mime it. The latter is always very funny and something teenager are rather good at.
I would not play a Board game in class but the painting of terms (like “Montagsmaler” ) could be done in small groups while miming is something for the whole class.
I’m not teaching yet, so I don’t have any experiences to share, but I would like to try a kid-frendly version of “Cards Against Humanity”, a matching game where you have to pick the most hilarious word to fill in a blank. As the title suggests, a lot of the word combinations are very explicit and it would be a lot of work to come up with enough age appropriate words to make the game still playable.
While writing this, I googled if there is a kid-friendly version of the game and there actually is a “Family Edition” and also “Cards Against Maturity”.
I haven’t been teaching yet entire classes. However, in individual teaching lessons I can see the positive effect of little games. Whenever the concentration is low, games can help to regain energy and motivation. Besides the achieve interesting learning effects – of course.
I will only meet my class 12 the week after next, but I intend to have them play a game that will get us started talking about the novel we are reading.
I envision splitting the class up in small groups of three or four. For the first lesson, I would like them to pick a character from the novel. In their small group, I want them to devise a guessing game for the rest of the class: which character did they choose? They might want to play hangman, sharades, taboo, draw the character on the blackboard, work with associations, give clues, or what not. This will already give us hints as to what everybody focuses on with respect to a certain character.
For the second lesson, I would like them to focus on a scene that stood out to them. Again in small groups, I would like them to convey the gist of that scene to the whole class – acting it, portraying it as a living statue, drawing it, … Again, everybody else is guessing.
Ideally, this will get them talking about the first sections of the novel in their small groups and have them feell and think their way into both a character and a scene.
I will share how this worked out after I’ve done it 🙂
During my first „Praktikum“ at a Waldorf school I used a „memory“ game to work on simple present and progressive and the negotiations thereof. Different groups focused on the different times/negotiations (e.g. one group would work on the pair „I sit“ – „I am sitting“ another one on „I sit“ – „I do not sit“ and so on). Each group got different colored paper. They really enjoyed working on it (they were also allowed to draw pictures), they used the vocabulary they were acquainted with and asked for new words. We also used the cards in different settings, not just memory 🙂 It was a great experience and a lot of fun!
I think games are one of the most important things in the FL. At the moment I am in a 5th grade and they don’t play any games and you can see how the pupil lost their interest in the language!
During one of my internships I did an epoch in which the children had to invent their own games. The subject of these games was that they should serve other students in the future, to learn a new tense.
For me, games are a creative and fun way for students to work on the language without doing so consciously.
I use games in all of my classes and I can really see my students benefiting from them. Depending on the grade, I use different games or different versions/adaptions of games to practice vocabulary, grammar, and language production skills. For example, bingo, word chain, or miming.
On a different note, especially now, in times of social distancing, it is so important that students still experience the feeling of being part of a group and be social (e.g. learn together). Games are an excellent instrument to do so.
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16 Comments
I am really looking forward to learning about your experiences with using games in the foreign language classroom!
In the upper school, many students really enjoy the creative writing/storytelling games/activities outlined in Paul Matthews’ book, “Sing me the Creation: Creative Writing Sourcebook”… They’re a lot of fun and tend to get students to overcome their reservations and speak or write freely. Also, transferring any sort of grammar revision into pair work, in which silly or incongruous words have to be spontaneously built into sentences / a story … But are those types of games ‘relevant’ in terms of media?
When doing newspaper work, games which involve matching silly/absurd/incongruous headlines to their pictures can be fun. Later, students can draft the article which they imagine belong to the picture and headline (and then perhaps compare them to the actual article).
To my mind games are more important than ever because they bring the students into direct interactivity. They can act and speak spontaneously without intelectual demand.
In a French lesson in class 9 we played the very popular game “To pack one’s bags” and I was impressed by the pupil’s memory: a class of 32 pupils packed the whole bag without failing!
An interesting game for younger students might also be “Dobble”. It´s a guessing game and has very easy rules. I used to play it with a little girl who didn`t speak a lot of german and she loved it. 🙂
Throw the dice and say the matching number. Keep going until you have said all numbers! Add the numbers or subtract the number of a second dice!!! It’s fun.
Yeah I liked this section! I did this in French Lessons also!
We used to play “Did you pinch me?”- Five pupils stand in front of the class, they´re the “pinchers”. Teacher says “Heads down, thumbs up!” Then everybody lays down his/her head on the table, putting up one thumb. The pinchers walk around and pick one Person which they pinch in the thumb. after they picked one they go back to the front and wait until all the pinchers are done. The teacher (watching everything) says: “Heads up” and the Five “pinched ones” stand up. Then they ask one Person they suspect being the one who pinched him/her: “did you pinch me?”.The answer can be adapted to the Level of the class. If he/she guessed right, the pincher is demasked and has to sit down.
The game is nice to practise the simple past.
I´m super exited about all your ideas, making notes like a crazy Person.. thank you!!
I enjoyed learning about games in this section and appreciate reading other people’s suggestions!
I am not teaching yet either, but I would like to share the experience of playing “Activity” with my family. “Activity” is a board game where you have cards with different topics the others players have to guess. You usually play it in teams. You move from field to field and have to either describe a certain term with other words (like Taboo) or paint or mime it. The latter is always very funny and something teenager are rather good at.
I would not play a Board game in class but the painting of terms (like “Montagsmaler” ) could be done in small groups while miming is something for the whole class.
I am not teaching yet either, but I would like to share the game “Activity”.
“Activity” is a board game where you have cards with different topics the others players have to guess. You usually play it in teams. You move from field to field and have to either describe a certain term with other words (like Taboo) or paint or mime it. The latter is always very funny and something teenager are rather good at.
I would not play a Board game in class but the painting of terms (like “Montagsmaler” ) could be done in small groups while miming is something for the whole class.
I’m not teaching yet, so I don’t have any experiences to share, but I would like to try a kid-frendly version of “Cards Against Humanity”, a matching game where you have to pick the most hilarious word to fill in a blank. As the title suggests, a lot of the word combinations are very explicit and it would be a lot of work to come up with enough age appropriate words to make the game still playable.
While writing this, I googled if there is a kid-friendly version of the game and there actually is a “Family Edition” and also “Cards Against Maturity”.
I haven’t been teaching yet entire classes. However, in individual teaching lessons I can see the positive effect of little games. Whenever the concentration is low, games can help to regain energy and motivation. Besides the achieve interesting learning effects – of course.
I will only meet my class 12 the week after next, but I intend to have them play a game that will get us started talking about the novel we are reading.
I envision splitting the class up in small groups of three or four. For the first lesson, I would like them to pick a character from the novel. In their small group, I want them to devise a guessing game for the rest of the class: which character did they choose? They might want to play hangman, sharades, taboo, draw the character on the blackboard, work with associations, give clues, or what not. This will already give us hints as to what everybody focuses on with respect to a certain character.
For the second lesson, I would like them to focus on a scene that stood out to them. Again in small groups, I would like them to convey the gist of that scene to the whole class – acting it, portraying it as a living statue, drawing it, … Again, everybody else is guessing.
Ideally, this will get them talking about the first sections of the novel in their small groups and have them feell and think their way into both a character and a scene.
I will share how this worked out after I’ve done it 🙂
During my first „Praktikum“ at a Waldorf school I used a „memory“ game to work on simple present and progressive and the negotiations thereof. Different groups focused on the different times/negotiations (e.g. one group would work on the pair „I sit“ – „I am sitting“ another one on „I sit“ – „I do not sit“ and so on). Each group got different colored paper. They really enjoyed working on it (they were also allowed to draw pictures), they used the vocabulary they were acquainted with and asked for new words. We also used the cards in different settings, not just memory 🙂 It was a great experience and a lot of fun!
I think games are one of the most important things in the FL. At the moment I am in a 5th grade and they don’t play any games and you can see how the pupil lost their interest in the language!
During one of my internships I did an epoch in which the children had to invent their own games. The subject of these games was that they should serve other students in the future, to learn a new tense.
For me, games are a creative and fun way for students to work on the language without doing so consciously.
I use games in all of my classes and I can really see my students benefiting from them. Depending on the grade, I use different games or different versions/adaptions of games to practice vocabulary, grammar, and language production skills. For example, bingo, word chain, or miming.
On a different note, especially now, in times of social distancing, it is so important that students still experience the feeling of being part of a group and be social (e.g. learn together). Games are an excellent instrument to do so.