Games in the Classroom
In the teaching of productive skills and the teaching of receptive skills activities will usually involve some form of game and our consideration here will be the use of games in the classroom.
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We can start with a definition of what we actually mean by a game and basically this has three components.
A game is an activity that;
1) Has rules 2) Should have (for its use in the classroom) a teaching point 3) Should include an element of fun So that will be our working definition for a game that we are going to use in the classroom.
There are many different types of games and they range between the competitive, where we are working individually or as a team against others. Or those that are co-operative, requiring people to work together as groups of the whole class. There are also all sorts of games that involve both of these together.
We will consider two well-known games from a long list that we could give such as, Scrabble, monopoly, tic-tac-toe, and jeopardy and so on and so forth we will have a look at two of those games and see how they can be adapted for classroom.
For our first example we take a common game that's been played over the years which is called noughts and crosses in the UK, or tic-tac-toe in the USA.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
We are going to adapt this game for classroom use, so we've taken the normal tic-tac-toe or noughts and crosses grid and we've just numbered out each of the particular squares. What we can do now, is to form teams and those teams can then be asked a series of questions. They get to choose which question they want from 1 to 9. So let's imagine team 1 chooses question 1. That could be on anything that they have studied such as grammar or vocabulary. If they get that question correct and say they are the crosses, then they get to put their mark there. What the next group (Team 2) will probably do, is to try to block them in some way by choosing squares 2, or 4 or 5. Again their choice relates to some grammar or vocabulary point. This is a very simple use of noughts and crosses for checking they have understood your teaching of the language you covered in your lessons.
Our next example of a game that we can adapt very easily for classroom use is the game of Jeopardy. In this particular game what we can do is to have a set of levels for our questions and a set of topics, as shown in the table below.
Spelling Tenses Conditionals Parts of speech Idioms
Level 1 (1 point)
Level 2 (2 points)
Level 3 (3 points)
Teams are created and they can take turns to choose questions at the level and from the topics as they wish. The winning team will be the one with the most points when all questions have been asked. You can put a mark in each box as the questions come out, to show it is no longer available.
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