Students creating a grammar game.
This idea came from Sherry Amorocho (@amor8 on twitter) and from her great post on her blog about students explaining a Spanish grammar point to each other and creating a little activity for their classmates to practice. I thought this was enticing well with the buzz word going on at the moment in my school: PLTS (= Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills) which comprises six groups of skills:
independent enquirers
creative thinkers
reflective learners
team workers
self-managers
effective participants.
So I tried this activity with my year 7 groups (11-12 years old). The grammar point was about the French prepositions a / a l' / a la / au / aux / (= to/at) after être (= to be) or aller (= to go).
I skipped Sherry Amorocho's first step which is about students explaining to each other the concept because I was running out of time to include it in the lesson. So I explained the concept to them first, then did two little exercises to make sure most of the group grabbed the concept. Finally we got to the interesting part of the lesson! I asked my students to get into groups of 2-3 and create a game to practice the concept. They then had to show their game to another group so that they could play. At the end of the lesson, the class had to choose the best game and why they thought it was good. Of course, my lesson was far too long and the students only managed to create their games. But with only 2 hours a week to deliver French, I have to squeeze a lot in a single lesson to complete all the things we have to do as part of the curriculum! The main thing is that my students liked creating a game. I made sure that everyone in the group had an assigned job: a low ability student who likes drawing would be assigned to design the game, whereas a top ability student would write the rules. All groups came up with very good games, students were all engaged. It is just a shame we didn't have time to really test the games but it is definitely something I will try again in the future.Thank you Sherry for inspiring me!Below you can see my PowerPoint lesson and pictures of two games made by the students.
And you? What kind of PLTS activities have you tried yet?
