This is an idea from teacher Sophia West, who posted it on Facebook on the MFL Teachers’ Lounge group. I’m sure she won’t mind me reproducing it here. Sophia wrote:
”If you’ve played Cards Against Humanity you’ll know what I’m getting at, but for those who haven’t, I tried a game called “finis ma phrase” with Y10 and Y11 today and it worked really well! Can be done orally or on whiteboards for written work. I did it both ways today with some very patient French exchange students!
I just put a simple sentence starter on each slide of a PowerPoint, e.g. “j’adore manger...”; “le français me stresse car...” and divide the kids into groups of about 6. One student in the group reads the sentence starter aloud to the others. The others all think of their response and either say it or write it, e.g. “le français me stresse car c’est trop compliqué/ma prof me donne trop de devoirs/on n’a pas de chats dans la salle de classe...” etc - as sensible or as wacky as you like). The person who read the starter chooses their favourite and that person wins a point. Play then moves to the next person on the table, who reads out a new sentence starter on a new slide and so on and so forth. The person with the most points at the end of the game wins.
Really low prep but the kids loved it and it broke the ice well with the exchange students! With more advanced students you could probably encourage them to argue the point with the rest of the group to try and convince the others that they deserve the point...? Or tailor it to more specific exam questions if you want to be less frivolous... Or add in a “taboo” element so certain words are banned from answers...?”
Nice idea, I thought. If you are worried that your class doesn’t handle group work well and would waste time, you could still take the general principle and do something a little less “fun”. You could display your sentence starter, model some endings, then get pupils to write down as many ends as they can think of to a time limit, say four minutes. You could then elicit answers and write a selection up on the board.
An alternative would be to display sentence ends. In this case pupils write down the start of the sentence. This gets pupils producing verbs. You could specify what time frame you would prefer to elicit certain verb tenses.
Just to finish by mentioning that the Facebook professional groups are super. Friendly, helpful and full of ideas. UK teachers can check out MFL Teachers’ Lounge, Secondary MFL Matters and GILT ( Global Innovative Language Teachers). The latter leans more towards research and an international perspective.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
”If you’ve played Cards Against Humanity you’ll know what I’m getting at, but for those who haven’t, I tried a game called “finis ma phrase” with Y10 and Y11 today and it worked really well! Can be done orally or on whiteboards for written work. I did it both ways today with some very patient French exchange students!
I just put a simple sentence starter on each slide of a PowerPoint, e.g. “j’adore manger...”; “le français me stresse car...” and divide the kids into groups of about 6. One student in the group reads the sentence starter aloud to the others. The others all think of their response and either say it or write it, e.g. “le français me stresse car c’est trop compliqué/ma prof me donne trop de devoirs/on n’a pas de chats dans la salle de classe...” etc - as sensible or as wacky as you like). The person who read the starter chooses their favourite and that person wins a point. Play then moves to the next person on the table, who reads out a new sentence starter on a new slide and so on and so forth. The person with the most points at the end of the game wins.
Really low prep but the kids loved it and it broke the ice well with the exchange students! With more advanced students you could probably encourage them to argue the point with the rest of the group to try and convince the others that they deserve the point...? Or tailor it to more specific exam questions if you want to be less frivolous... Or add in a “taboo” element so certain words are banned from answers...?”
Nice idea, I thought. If you are worried that your class doesn’t handle group work well and would waste time, you could still take the general principle and do something a little less “fun”. You could display your sentence starter, model some endings, then get pupils to write down as many ends as they can think of to a time limit, say four minutes. You could then elicit answers and write a selection up on the board.
An alternative would be to display sentence ends. In this case pupils write down the start of the sentence. This gets pupils producing verbs. You could specify what time frame you would prefer to elicit certain verb tenses.
Just to finish by mentioning that the Facebook professional groups are super. Friendly, helpful and full of ideas. UK teachers can check out MFL Teachers’ Lounge, Secondary MFL Matters and GILT ( Global Innovative Language Teachers). The latter leans more towards research and an international perspective.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Do you think it could work as a starter or plenary also?
ReplyDelete