GAMES

“What’s your telephone number?” I ask them all for phone numbers and make them say “My telephone number is…”. I write as many as I can on the whiteboard. Then I make two teams (A & B) and ask for two students from each team, giving them a whiteboard marker. I then say a telephone number loudly, and the first person to circle the number wins. Team names can be animals, countries or whatever, but usually it’s just A and B. Change students. Grade 4, 5 & 6. This game can also be played with times and flashcards or word cards. Very fast and interesting.

Circle the word. Similar to the above. Two teams, and on the whiteboard, I have about twenty words from flashcards in consecutive series, i.e. ABC words, DEF words etc. After reviewing the cards and showing where the word card word is on the board, two students compete to circle a word. In grade 2, I show them the word card so they can search the word on the board. Sometimes I just say the word. Students often fight to participate at a time with flashcards for Grade 2. Sometimes it’s 15 minutes long, but many wrong words get circled and have to be corrected.

Hangman Killer Game. I have played this game for an entire class many times. It’s almost too popular. Words can come from the flashcard or from anywhere, as long as they are well known. If this game is already known, it can be played for 5 minutes as an attention getter. The object is for students to guess a word one letter at a time before a stick figure man is drawn on a gallows hanging. For each wrong letter guess, part of the gallows and stick figure man is drawn. After about 11 wrong guesses, the man is dead. It’s a very funny and intriguing game but the students almost always collaborate and win.

Word groups flashcards. I just bought 3 sets of these word cards with pictures but no Hangul equivalent. They are categorized into Pets, Toys, Colors, Expressions, Classroom, The Body, Numbers, Adjectives, People, Clothes, Questions, and so on. There are many variations and activities for these cards besides just repetition and memory work. Just one example, the cards are all in English lower case, i.e. “cosmos”. So in a lesson on learning the upper case and lower case, students can be asked to write the same word in upper case. i.e. “COSMOS”. Grade 1 and 2.

I have a set of 150 flashcards with the Hangul equivalent on the reverse. On the front is an english lower case word and a picture of the word. There is also a thin magnetic strip because these cards were made to run through an audio machine so the word could be heard. This method was never used by me of course because I am a native speaker. I used to warm-up the classes a lot with these cards, working several letters per class, depending on the number of words per letter. I tried all the cards in one class but it took too long, students were bored, and so was I. The cards are just props, sometimes, for other activities and conversations too numerous to go into now, but a picture of candy could follow “Do you like candy?”, or a picture of a person swimming could ask the question “Can you swim?”

In my journal entry I asked ‘What can I do to start each class besides flashcards?” and I eventually found the following, but by no means complete list of things:

1. Grade 5 & 6 can listen to a cassette of popular music.
2. Repeat numbers and the alphabet, or write it on the board
3. Grade 1, 2, & 3 can sing a song with gestures
4. Grade 4 can learn a song, a five minute exercise that can turn into a 40 minute class, which is OK
5. Ask “How is the weather today?” “How do you feel today?”
6. Write the date, day, and time one the board, after asking the class for the answer
7. practice free conversation or read English on tea shirts, pencil cases etc.
8. write a tongue twister on the board and get everyone in the class to try it. These twisters should emphasize Korean problems in pronunciation.
9. Play the disappearing word game or other flash card TPR games.
10. Play Hangman, a 15 minuter exercise that can turn into 40 minutes very easily.

The following is the entire flashcard vocabulary I have been trying to build in all grades this year. My new set of cards have different word groups and total 360 words. These words total 150. I found it really helped sometimes to know the Korean meaning of the word, if you can pronounce it. Students help you with pronunciation.