Archived from Englipedia.
Originally submitted by D. Justin R. Moriarty II on Dec 24, 2010.
MATERIALS NEEDED:
- A little preparation: During the ten minute period between classes, the teacher should arrive as soon as possible to see how many rows of students there are so they know how many teams they can make. After checking, the instructor should divide the blackboard into how many teams there will be, and on each section, write the alphabet all over each team’s section scrambled in random parts of their alphabet board.
DETAILED EXPLANATION:
- Demonstrate and explain how the activity works. Give a student at the front of one of the rows a piece of chalk. Ask one student how to spell a word, for example, “English,” verbally. The student must cross-out the “E” on their alphabet board and pass the chalk to the next student in their row. Each student in that row follows pattern and crosses out the next letter in the word "English" until the keyword is completely crossed out. After this initial demonstration, confirm the students’ understanding. If they still don’t understand, use another next team to demonstrate and use a different word as an example.
- This time with all teams involved, give another word to spell as a practice round. This time, tell the students that they cannot help each other by telling them what letter they should cross-out, nor can they use dictionaries. However, students can tell each other what the keyword is. Tell the students that EVERYONE must finish, and that if one team finishes, it’s not over.
- Upon completion of all teams’ participation, show how the point system works. If there are four teams, the team that finishes first gets four points; second place gets three points; third place gets two points; and fourth place gets one point. Then, if in the event that a word is misspelled such as having an extra letter, lacks a letter, or has a wrong letter, for every mistake they make, they lose one point. After this warmup round, once again check students’ understanding. If there are some students who do not understand, have students who understand consult with those who do not.
- After confirming students’ understanding, tell them it is officially game time, and that they’ll be playing for real points. Depending on how much time a teacher wants to dedicate to this activity, the instructor can give five to ten words for the students to play with.
TEACHING SUGGESTIONS:
- This activity works very effectively for high school OC1 classes as a warmup. Due to the rules and conditions, it creates an atmosphere of high awareness, intense teamwork, and most of all, a lot of fun.
- If one dedicates this to being more of a warm-up activity as opposed to using for an entire lesson, hopefully you may have a small award system in place if the teachers and administration of your school allows it. For the team that gets the most points at the end, they can probably receive small stickers for their notebooks. Be sure to indicate this before playing this game for points.