Wednesday, January 6, 2016

The Game of Things for the MFL classroom

Last week during Christmas vacation, my family gathered at my sister's house to play "The Game of Things".  After 1 round, I was already making plans to play it in Spanish class.  


Find it at Target or Walmart
The rules of the game are:
1.  A person reads a card from the game, such as "Things that you wish grew on trees", 
2. Players write an answer to what they wish grew on trees, and put their answers in a basket.
3. I read the submitted answers (since I saw the handwriting, I didn't guess but I still put my answer in with the others.) 
4. While the answers are read, have a student write the answers on the board
5. Person A chooses one of the answers (they can not choose the answer they wrote) and guesses who said it.
6. If Person A guessed correctly, s/he gets a point and the person s/he guessed cannot play in this round. Person A continues to guess until s/he is incorrect.
7. If Person A is incorrect, play moves to Person B and Person B tries to guess one of the answers.
8. Play continues until the person guessing has guessed all answers and is left only with his/her own.  The person receives 2 points since nobody guessed what they wrote.

A week after I played the game, I saw a teacher's Facebook post about the game. Click on this link to find some sample questions on Quizlet that you can translate to your TL.  Or, personalize it and write your own questions.

I played this game on the first day back after Christmas vacation (trying to ease into a five day school week again), with my Spanish 5 students.  We played with 9 people and it worked well. You can play with more people (I played it the second time during my vacation on New Year's Eve with 15 people and that was still fun, but definitely harder. It took us about 30 minutes to complete one round! Of course, there was a lot of conversation along with the guessing.)

If you want to play this game with a larger class, you could:
1. divide the students into two or three groups. 
2. 9 or 10 students write the answers; divide the rest of the class into teams of two and the teams work to guess who wrote the answer.  The students that wrote the answers can sit in a line in front to make it clear which persons they can ask.
3. Divide the class into teams of 2 or 3.  The students in each team write their answer on the same paper.  Students work together as teams to guess which teams said which answers.

This link is to the online rule. Adjust as needed for your classroom.
This link is to a video of a man explaining the game. Ignore his comments that it is for adults only. 
My students really enjoyed this game. If you don't try it with your students, I still recommend that you try it with your friends. 

In fact, maybe I can convince my CI teacher friends to play this one of the evenings at IFLT. (What do you think Martina? Will you and others be "game" for this?) 

2 comments:

  1. I'm totally 'game'!!! We could meet at the haunted hotel to play ;-)

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    Replies
    1. I'll count on it - haunted hotel room always a possibility!

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