Alphabet Game

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to expand students’ vocabulary and encourage linguistic teamwork by playing the alphabet game.

This one is a twist on a classic car-ride game! I like to use it for the first or second day of the semester as it’s a great way to “warm up” students’ brains if they haven’t been thinking about the target language for a while, and it can also be a fun creativity starter for any day of the year.

Step One: Divide students into groups. This can be done individually, but it won’t be as much fun!

Step Two: Give students a large piece of paper/chart paper with the letters of the alphabet. When a signal is given, they can start writing. They should work fast, as it’s a race to the finish!

Example of an alphabet themed by food with illustrations. Source: https://www.jenniferhines.design/food-alphabet-illustration-series

Step Three: Students write a word that starts with each letter of the alphabet in the target language. This can be general for lower levels (literally any word except for proper nouns) or more specific for more advanced learners (adjectives, words within a theme, words longer than 5 letters, etc.)

You might feel like this might be too easy for your students, but I promise you, it’s actually not. That’s for the same reason that I know I love books, and have read literally thousands of them. However, ask me to write a title of a book I’ve read for each letter of the alphabet, and my mind goes blank, as if I’ve never seen a book in my life! It’s the same with students and vocabulary, especially at the beginning of a semester.

 Step Four: Once one of the groups finishes their entire alphabet, they call “Time!” and then everyone has to put their pens down. Then the scoring begins as each group shares their words with the class. The group gets a point for a word IF NO ONE ELSE WROTE IT AS WELL. For example, say there are six groups in an ELL class, and Group A wrote “Apple”, Group B wrote “Anaconda”, Group C wrote “Advil”, Group D wrote “Adoort”, Group E wrote “Apple” and Group F left their space blank. Only Group B would get a point: Group A and E had the same word, Group C used a proper noun, Group D didn’t write an English word, and Group F didn’t provide a word in time.

Step Five: Continue going through the alphabet as a class and groups self-score as they go. This can be a great opportunity for impromptu vocabulary and grammar lessons. For example, when I do this exercise with my French students they struggle with thinking of words that begin with ‘k’ or ‘z’ that their classmates may not know. I like to share what I think is one of the cruelest words in French: ‘zozoter’, which means ‘to lisp’ but is impossible for someone with a lisp to actually say!  It’s also interesting to see what words your students bring to the table; maybe they love reading about animals and have a bunch of French animal vocabulary. I find that students enjoy the game because it’s low stakes, involves group work, and does challenge them to think beyond the basic vocabulary.

This can be a good game to have up your sleeve for substitutes, since once they’ve played it, students don’t need further instructions. As the teacher, you can also play on your own paper, and students can try and ‘beat the teacher’. I also like to keep the papers from the beginning of the year, and then play the alphabet game at the end of the year as a fun wrap-up. Then I put up their sheets from the beginning of the year, compare them to our most recent version, and we all admire how much more expansive our vocabulary has become!

Image: https://improvgames.com/alphabet-2/ (Note: I’d change “Darlene” to “Darling” in the fourth speech bubble, since the scene already established the name Betsy)

IMPROV ADAPTATION: There is a popular improv game also called the ‘Alphabet Game’ which is based on similar principles. This, in contrast to the written “Alphabet Game” above, is quite difficult because you need to stick to the context of the scene, react to the previous sentence, and have it all make sense! I’d say this is for advanced learners, but worth a try with eager (and willing to fail and start again) intermediate learners!

My favorite descriptor of the game is from Improvgames.com because eagle eyes will notice that they do the whole post in a meta-style, starting each sentence with the first letter of the alphabet. (Note: You could do a similar adaptation as a written game for students, using it for a quickwrite prompt, for example!) There is also an elimination version of this game, which allows more than two people to play the game at the same time (as demonstrated in this video by Splash Games).

UPDATE: I saw this great visual brain teaser about all the letters of the alphabet, which could make a fun starter to this starter! Answers can be found at the thinkaboutmaps Instagram page.

Have you played this before? Are there any variations that you recommend to make this easier, harder, or more interesting? Share in the comments!

Warm-Up: Find 5 Things

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to start class with a fun, visual warm-up game that enhances students’ vocabulary knowledge.

The “5 things” game is one that was modeled for me at a professional development session, and I used it the very next day in my classroom! My students like it, it’s easy to explain, there are literally infinite variations on it, and it somehow manages to be both competitive AND team building!

STEP ONE: Students are put into pairs (or threes if needed). They do not need to be sitting close to their ‘partner’, in fact, it’s better if they are not!

STEP TWO: The teacher puts up an image. Literally any image, as long as there are at least five things (hence the name) that can be identified.

STEP THREE: Ultimately, the goal of the game is to gain points by having the same five words as your partner to describe the picture (one point per answer, maximum five points per round). Once the image is revealed, I’ll give students a few minutes to write down their answers silently and secretly. So, for example, if I show this picture, a student might write down:

Image still from: The Princess and the Frog (Disney)

1. Princess

2. Frog

3. Night

4. Kiss

5. Tiara

This can be made harder or easier, more focused on grammar or less. For example, the first image I used was pretty simplistic. I’m not saying you should use Where’s Waldo, but an image of a Haitian market, for example, might make the game more difficult! If the parameters I give are just to have the same words, I always have the rule that all nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs are all allowed EXCEPT for colors! Unless it’s a beginner-level class, having to rely on colors seems a bit like cheating to me. However, you can definitely make this more complex by putting stricter parameters around the image. For example, I may say that students need to find two nouns, two verbs, and one adjective.  Therefore, the imaginary student’s list might look like this:

1.     NOUN: a frog

2.     NOUN: a princess

3.     VERB: to kiss

4.     VERB: to blush

5.     ADJECTIVE: romantic

If you’re working on a particular grammatical construction, then you can put up an image and say “find five of the same verbs in the imperfect form”. Or if there is an image that involves a lot of unit vocabulary you can say “find five of the same words (doesn’t matter what part of speech), but spelling counts!”

STEP FOUR: Partners tally up the points (the silent and secret part is now over). Using the above first example, if Student A wrote princess, night, frog, kiss, tiara and Student B wrote princess, frog, kiss, gloves, dress then they would have 3 out of 5 possible points because they chose three of the same words. It’s then the honor system for students to share out how many points they have. Sometimes I’ll do multiple images and we’ll have a ‘winner’ for that day’s total. Other times, I’ll do an image a day for a week and we’ll have the ‘winner’ for that week’s total.

STEP FIVE: Share out some the answers! It’s a great way to build vocabulary for the rest of the class, and some of the answers can be really fun or surprising. My favorite question to ask is “what is a word that your partner had that you didn’t?” because those are usually the more unique words and students are more likely to share their partner’s answer in order to showcase their partner’s brilliance than they are their own (though that’s high school students, elementary students might be more open to sharing their own thoughts!)

STEP SIX: Continue using it as an intermittent warm-up for class and change it up however you see fit. I like using themed images (example, fairy tales for my fairy tale unit) but as long as the image is appropriate, why not use it! Like I mentioned above, I’ll put different parameters around the words they need to find and sometimes I give the ultimate difficult instruction: find five words that your partner DOES NOT have! Students only get points if their words are totally unique… so they really need to dig deep into their vocabulary knowledge stores. The other thing you can then do is use the same picture, now that they have a bunch of vocabulary at the ready, for a quickwrite.

 Some examples of dynamic pictures to use as prompts:

Have you ever played this game or a variation on it? Are there any constrictions or images you prefer using? Share in the comments!

Quickwrites!

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to encourage students’ creativity and writing skills, as well as lessening their anxiety about making mistakes, by using quickwrites.

Have you ever given students ten minutes to write, only to realize that they’ve only written three lines? It’s not that they’re being uncompliant, they just “don’t have any ideas”, or, for many students with negative language-learning experiences, they are scared to write anything if it’s not perfect. This is where getting into the habit of doing a “quickwrite” is useful!

I love starting a class with a quickwrite, especially if we’re not starting with a sharing circle. It eases us into the day, and gets us in that French mindset. It’s also a great reminder for students, because I repeat it again and again, that it’s about communication and not about being exact! If students don’t know a word, they don’t stop and look it up, they just put it in English between brackets or virgules, and look it up or ask after the quickwrite is done. The whole idea is fluidity of thought, not worrying about mistakes, and realizing how much you actually know when you’re pushed for time!

If we’re going to be talking about specific content, it’s also a great way to get the students thinking about ideas. For example, I do a technology unit, and there are A LOT of great discussion questions: where measure of privacy should we expect? how should we treat robots when AI inevitably become sentient? Is the use of parental controls fair? And on and on.  For the students who don’t like spontaneous discussions, and need time to ruminate before speaking, putting it all down in a quickwrite is a way to put them at ease.

So what are some good quickwrite prompts?

• An ethical conundrum or serious question (see above)

• Put up an interesting photo or meme, ask students to describe it (adjectives!) or create a story around it (tenses!)

• Watch the first three minutes of a short film, have students finish the story. Then, when it’s over, watch the rest of the film and compare in small groups how their own stories were similar or different. Most of the time, students’ stories are equally as good or better!

• Do a quickdraw first where students draw a picture. Then, after exchanging the drawings with a partner, describe or narrate the other person’s drawing

  • It’s not technically a quickwrite, but something similar that I love doing is the Telephone Pictionary It’s always fun, quick, and makes for a great opening to class filled with laughter.

  • Also similar are other ways of generating visual ideas for students to inspire each other (and have some kinetic fun!). For example, students can make shapes or mini-scenes with pipe-cleaners (thanks Vanessa Drew for this idea!), found objects in the class, or even with play-doh. You’d be surprised how much senior students get into this, having not had the opportunity to play around like this since elementary school!

• Pull three to five unit vocab words from a hat that students need to use in a story

• Literally anything that gets them writing!

• NOTE: A lot of prompts that work well for improv scenes work equally well for quickwrites! Check out a list of creative prompts here.

What do we do with them when the ten (or however many minutes you choose) are up?

• A question prompt can be a lead-in to a discussion, and it lets students know where the gaps in their vocabulary are so they can look up words before they start talking

• Students can be given time to edit and then reflect on areas they need improvement on

• If you gave students explicit instructions of what to include (for example, they need to use as many transition words as possible and they are allowed to use a list of transition words if they need it) you can have a competition where they count them and you see who had the most of whatever it was. RESOURCE: French Transition Words

• Exchange with another student for them just to read or for them to edit or give feedback

• SUMMATIVE FEEDBACK FOR/FROM ME

  • Often, I’ll have students focus on one thing only and I’ll give them feedback only on that one thing. This is good for me, because I don’t need to do a lot of marking, just looking at one aspect of students’ writing. They are less nervous because I don’t care about anything else they’re writing (this can be hard because when I see an error that is unrelated to the one thing I said I would look for I just really, really, really want to correct it. However, I refrain, because I want students to trust me and not feel constantly judged). I will ask students to highlight or underline that one thing, for example adjectives, and then I can also see that they know what they are supposed to be doing (if they also highlight adverbs, then we need to revisit definitions!) and then give feedback just on those things. IF I have time, I’ll also respond to their writing itself, like commenting on the story, but this is just a ‘quickmark’ for me!

  • If there is a concept that students are struggling with, having TWO highlighter colors can be a great communication between you and the student. For example, they highlight or underline in yellow all the adjective uses that they are confident in, but highlight or underline in green all the adjective uses they think might be wrong. That way you see where the common issues are, but also where students think their issues are! This also gives them permission to make mistakes even on the things you’re looking for. If they’ve been scared to use the adjective “vieux” because they’re unsure where it goes or how it changes, now’s the time to go for it! (This is a true story for me… I still prefer “agé” so I can think less about it!)

  • For this purpose, I have students do their quickwrites in a journal that they use just for my class. A lined student notebook will get half-filled over a semester with quickwrites and other activities. Some students keep the journal over a few years of French and it’s really cool to see that long term progression! Once I’ve looked at the quickwrite I will put a sticker or a stamp (I have a large collection of stamps). This way if there’s no corrections to be made, but I don’t have time to personally respond with a sentence, students still know that I’ve looked at it!

• I even will use quickwrites prior to the writing sections on tests where there is a long writing component. Students get draft paper to get all their ideas out first, then they write on the official test paper. In these assessments I use a rubric that we’ve used to self-assess our previous quickwrites so that it’s not unfamiliar. RESOURCE: Legends Quickwrite Quiz (In this example, students choose one writing prompt to respond to. They are all types of prompts that we have practiced in class).

How do you use quickwrites in your classes? How long do you usually give students? Feel free to comment!