First W5 Game Day

Friday was the first official Game Day for my W5 class.  All the students shocked me by being up to date on their homework books and seemed to be pretty excited; honestly I really I can’t ever think of a time I was ever excited to play word games in English and I speak English. 

In the past this class has loved to play games at the end of class like Hangman and a game they call Word Chain where someone says one word and then you have to link the first letter of the new word to the last letter of the last word.  For example someone says banana -> apple -> eraser -> run -> notebook ->kitchen and so on and so forth.  It is not a bad game; however it gets dull for me after one or two rounds as I stand by the board and writes all the words out for them.  Sadly Hangman was only fun for the first few classes because these students have strong vocabulary and can count letters to guess words better than a card shark can count cards in poker. 

The first unofficial game day was kind of a mess.  They all wrote me letters begging for a game day due to stress.  They talked me into a game called Fruit Salad where everyone sits in a circle with one student in the middle.  There is a pattern of apple, banana, apple, banana that goes around the circle.  The student in the middle will yell out apple, banana, or fruit salad.  If they yell out apple all the apples have to jump up and swap seats, the last one standing is now the person in the middle.   The same thing goes on when they yell out banana however when they yell out fruit salad everyone has to swap seats.  After about 15 minutes of crazy, loud, madness and my boss stuck her head in the door to make sure everything was ok I came to the conclusion that Fruit Salad is not really an English word game.

To try to beef up the English in the game I swapped it to where the person in the middle would think of a category and all the people on the outside had to think of words that were related to that category.  It wasn’t perfect as students now just yelled out whatever came to their mind in both English and Korean and then fought over who said what word first and what words counted and what words didn’t count.  This went on for another 20 minutes or so leaving only 10 minutes left when I finally called the game of Categories to an end.  We spent the last 10 minutes playing ABC World Wind (not the best name but I had to think fast and make it sound fun), a game where they yet again stood in a circle and would go from letter to letter having to think of a word that started with the letter they were given. The last person standing is the ABC World Wind Champion. In these kinds of games I always feel bad for those that get letters like Q, U, V, X and Z as they often have to sit down early in the game. 

On Friday I got the idea to try to make my own Scrabble boards for game day however after an hour and a half and only one board complete I sadly had to bump it to the next game day.  Instead this time we played a knock off king of Boggle where I would write 15 letters on the board, break the class up into somewhat even teams of 3 each and then play one Justin Beber song as they tried to come up with as many words as they could.  Over all I must say it went pretty well minus the arguing over what is really a word and what is not.  Sadly they all wanted to use abbreviations and Korean names and well with it being an English game I just couldn’t allow them.  Sadly there was one team each round that would blow the other team out of the water with not only the words they came up with but also the amount of words they made.  I kept trying to evenly break the teams up after each round but sadly there is one girl in the class that stand out above the others when it comes to her vocabulary.  I did points based on what team won and who was on that team and the girl that won first place was nice enough to choose cookies as her prize and then sat there and gave one to everyone else in the class, not taking one for herself.  I found this to be quite interesting and offered her another choice of a Snickers Bar or Lolly Pop after class.

Over all I think it went well and look forward to having more game days with them in the months to come.