Game day

Every once in a while the teachers ask me to  plan just a bunch of games for my lessons. Usually its before a break when they just want the kids to have fun, and since this is one of the last weeks of the school year I've been having "game days" all week. My game day classes are with middle school 1st graders- the equivalent of a 7th grader in the US. They don't speak much English- mostly they can say what they like and do in the present and past tense. I usually have anywhere from 16-32 students.

I start by splitting them into 3 teams- team Buffalo, team Monkey, and team Eagle. They especially like this because I use the pictures of these animals I had used in my first self introduction and they always remember them. For the first game each team has a section on the black board. I give each a category: animal, food, sport. Then, one person at a time, they write one word from the category and the team with the most words, spelled correctly, no doubles, after 2 minutes gets one point. Then we switch from categories to words that start with a certain letter I choose. Then words with a certain amount of letters. Finally they start with their team name and must write a list of words with the first letter of a word being the last letter of the previous word.

When presenting a game like this I use simple English and lots of hand gestures and examples wherever possible. Theres always a Japanese teacher there to translate and check understanding. When I change the categories I write them up on the board and let the students try to figure them out for a minute before I give them an example. Then you can see all the light bulbs turn on- its a pretty cool moment. They get pretty into anything that has them working as a team and earning points and I like that everyone gets involved and the stronger speakers help the weaker ones so no one feels bad.

That usually lasts about 20-ish minutes. Then we move on to game 2: word scramble. I write a sentence on the board with the words in the wrong order. Then, again as teams, the students raise their hand and say the correct sentence for points- anywhere from 1-4 points for easy or difficult sentences. For short sentences they figure it out pretty quickly, so then we move on to having 2 sentences jumbled together. They must pick out the two separate sentences and, of course, get all the words in the correct order to get the points. I give them scratch paper to work thing out on. If one team is obviously no keeping up I call on those students first whenever they try to answer. This game is great for practicing word order. Often the students know what each word means and can understand what the sentence is supposed to say, but they get the order of things wrong because it is just to different from Japanese in many instances.

That games usually takes us to the end of the class. I've been having a lot of success with this plan this week- meaning the kids are having fun and getting really into and doing difficult things they generally aren't challenged to do without even realizing it. Apparently one teacher thought this was going so well that he wants me to do it on Friday with some of the 2nd graders. They were supposed to give speeches but he pushed those back to have this game day instead. So I guess this plan is a success to the teachers too.

Well this has basically been the biggest part of my week, aside from the weather. We have a storm blowing through so its been weirdly warm then really drizzly. Right now it sounds like its pouring pretty steadily. We have rice cooking and we're having fish tonight. We'll probably watch some friends with dinner, then I'll shower, prep my lunch, and go to bed. My commute this week is about an hour and a half each way so that seriously cuts into my down time. But only two more days! Then I get a 3-day weekend. Thats keeping me going!

K+K