Well, after a break from blogging (which was much longer than I had realised), I’m now back on track, bursting with new ideas for the next school year.  I’ve been back in the classroom for two weeks and been doing the typical “getting to know you” activities and some new games in the first lessons.

One of my colleagues, Rich, was telling em about an activity that he uses to help remember his students’ names – he asks them to think of a word in English which begins with the same letter, for example Pink Patricia or Jumping Javi.  I decided to turn this idea into a game which would get students working within different groups and practise the alphabet too.

I asked the students to line up in alphabetical order and then divided them into teams of students with the same first letter; we had Tem AEG (Álvaro, Elena, Elda, Gustavo), Team NOP (Nuria, Oscar, Pablo, Paco) and Team M (María, María, María and Manuel).  Each group had a piece of paper and had to write as many words as they could that began with the same letter as their team – more difficult for some teams than others.

Then Team AEG had to say a word which began with N, O, P or M and spell it correctly.  If they said a word which the other team had written on their paper, they got two points but if they thought of a different word, they got five points.  With other classes I also gave an extra point for every letter in the word, encouraging them to think of longer words.

The students enjoyed the game and it was lovely to see them working together with people they had originally not wanted to work with.  It was also interesting to see the vocabulary that the students knew and they came up with some really interesting words which they had picked up from computer games.