Old games can make help with those tremendous keys to learning: input and review. Remember that students have to hear it or read it to learn it, and they need to understand it to truly hear it (“comprehensible input”). Here are a couple that have worked well with my middle- and high-school classes at all levels:
Accordion story – Students write a line of the story, fold the paper over accordion style, swap, write the next line. Repeat until the page is full. Rules: no English, and no swapping with the same person twice. While things can get pretty wild during this game, with students flying around the room to swap papers, I like to keep the writing very structured by posting the sentence stems on the board for each line – one at a time. A Power Point does nicely for this, but typing it on the spot works, too. For example:
- My name is ____. (Encourage some silliness here by supplying examples like Miley Cyrus, Beyonce, Big Bird)
- I am from ____.
- I am ___ years old.
- My favorite food is ___.
- I like to ___ on the weekends.
- I have _____ siblings and ___ children.
- I am married to ____.
- Last week I was in the news for Tweeting a picture of ___.
- etc.
Mad-lib style story – Write a story full of numbered blanks that allows you to meet whatever teaching goals you have at the moment, remembering to review previous units. It doesn’t hurt if the story is tied to some recent event (Grammy’s, Super Bowl, election). Don’t worry about whether the story is creative or funny enough. The students’ words will supply that element. Give students the list of vocabulary to fill in, but don’t let them see the story yet. It’s best to work in pairs so they can tap one another’s memories for forgotten vocabulary. As they finish ,allow them to see the fill-in-the-blank version — you can print out some copies to put in plastic sheeting, so they are reused from class to class. Students read the story aloud filling in the blanks with their list of words. Tell them to swap stories with another pair of students and reread it. Ask for the silliest submissions to be read to the whole class.
Example: My name is [1] and I am from [2]. I hope you will vote for me to become President of [3]. You should vote for me because I am very [4] and [5]. …etc.. A name
- A name
- A place
- A country
- & 5. personality adjectives
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