Since many of my students are new arrivals in the USA, it is not unusual for them to have never read the book. We always spend the bulk of our time on reading comprehension. We read the book, watch the movie (both the cartoon version, and the updated version starring Jim Carrey), and compare/contrast the different versions of the story. The culminating activity is always a board game show-down to see who knows the story the best. I always allow students to reference the book, if needed, while play How The Grinch Stole Christmas Review Game, but they take it as a personal challenge to try and answer as many questions as possible without looking back at the text. Some tips I've learned through the years for playing these types of games in class:
Like many others, I have been online this semester, so I converted my How The Grinch Stole Christmas Review Game into a digital format. I've shared in many different posts about my process for converting games, and about the Game Play Script that my husband wrote for me to allow students to "draw" a card and "roll" the dice. If you want to see this particular game in action, you can check out this YouTube video: Rather than repeat information I've previously shared, I want to share with you some of the best ways I've found to use digital board games in a remote learning environment. There are so many wonderful scripts, add-ons, and other innovative ideas, but there are still limits to what we can do in these digital environments. Here some of the different ways my students and I have successfully experimented with playing digital board games:
This semester has been a lot of trial and error for me and my students, as I'm sure it has been for many others. I'm sure there are many other ways of playing games in a fully remote classroom, but these are the four that have worked the best for us. I hope it helps you to get some ideas for your classrooms as well. Happy teaching, everyone!
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and give each set of students a prepared egg carton. The first player shakes the carton, opens the lid, and multiplies the two numbers the pom poms are on. If he/she is correct, he/she gets a point. The second player then closes the lid, shakes, and multiplies the two numbers indicated. Play continues in this manner until time is up. The player with the most points is the winner.
Since the cartons are free, pom poms are extremely cheap, and set up takes almost no time at all, I keep sets of these in my classroom year round. When there are five minutes left in class all I have to do is pass out the cartons and students can play. It's a great academic time filler for the end of class, or a nice brain break for when we need a change of pace. Toss 'N Multiply Requiring even fewer materials, and taking almost as little time to create, is my students' other favorite fact practice game. All you need for Toss 'N Multiply is a small soccer ball (the one I use is size 1.5, 6"), and a marker. The reason I use the soccer ball is that the clearly defined sections make it easy to label. Write the numbers 1-12 in the sections of the ball, repeating as many times as necessary. If you get a ball with black and white sections, simply use a silver marker on the black sections. Let the numbers dry (should only take a few seconds), and set up is complete. To play, have students gather in a circle. You can choose to play as a whole class, or in groups of three to six students. Students must toss the ball under hand, and catch it with two hands. Toss the ball to a student, reminding him/her to catch with both hands. The student then looks and multiplies whatever two numbers his/her thumbs are on. There will be a couple of sections without numbers, due to the presence of logos and other advertising, but the student can always use a different finger if his/her thumb is on one of those sections. If the student is correct, he/she stays in the game. The ball is then tossed to another student who repeats the process. If a student answers incorrectly, he/she is out of the game and must sit down. The last student standing is the winner. Again, this is the perfect game for filling time at the end of class, or a brain break during class. The ball takes up very little room at all, and other than having students stand in a circle, there is no prep work. Picking Apples This last activity does take a little more prep and time, but it is still a lot of fun. When we play Picking Apples, my students help me clear space by shoving all of the desks to each side of the room. We then have a starting line at one end, and a table for our apples at the other. I divide the students into two to four teams, and each team has a set of cards (we usually put them on a chair near the team's starting area) and a bucket. At the opposite end of the room I place a table and hundreds of miniature apple erasers. When I start the game, the first person on each team grabs the top card, computes the answer to the problem shown (I have sets for multiplication and division as well as addition and subtraction), runs to the opposite side of the room, gathers the correct number of apples for the answer, and runs back to the team. If correct, he/she earns a point for his/her team. The second person then takes the bucket, grabs a new card, runs to the other end, dumps out the apples from person one, and gathers the correct number for his/her card. Play continues in this way until time is called. The team with the most points wins. When playing this game with more than two teams, I will appoint at least one student to be my fellow answer checker. Also, when the answer is a large number (such as 144), I do not take time to count all of the apples, I look, estimate, and ask the student to tell me verbally how many are there. This year has brought new challenges to our lives; students are no longer all in the classroom together, and when they are in the classroom the sharing of materials is forbidden. Thus there is no Picking Apples game play this year. Instead I created digital task cards for students to practice with. Each card features a single problem written in the clouds, a basket to hold their apples, and an apple tree with over 150 apples on it (I copied and pasted the apple about 15 times, selected them all, aligned them to center and middle, and then copied and pasted the stacks to create "infinity" piles of apples in the tree.). On all of the sets except subtraction, the basket is actually a pile of baskets, so students can use groupings (such as repeated addition) to help them find the answer. These digital task cards allow students to safely use manipulatives to practice their basic math facts, 1-12 for multiplication and division, 1-20 for addition and subtraction. When making these kinds of digital activities I always design my non-moving elements in PowerPoint and save them as image files. I then upload those images as the background of my Google Slides. In order to speed up the background insertion (these activities had between 146 and 202 slides each!), I've long used the add-on Slides Toolbox. I once again used Slides Toolbox, but I also needed to do something else: randomize the slides. In order to be sure I included all of the facts students needed to practice, I created the task cards in order. When using paper task cards this isn't a problem, because I simply shuffle them before giving them to students. Digital task cards a little more tricky, and I needed a way to shuffle them so students would have to do more than count in sequence for the answers (multiplication is still in order because you may want to practice only certain facts). Thankfully, much as there's an app for every situation, there's an add-on for every situation today. I used every teacher's best friend, Google, and found an add-on called Slides Randomizer. This add-on will randomize the order of your slides once, or every time you open the file. You can choose to have the first slide remain stationary or not, and you can initiate a randomization of slides anytime you choose. In order to reset slides, you must use the back or undo button, and they will not return to their original order when you close the file. I decided it was worth a try, and it worked great. It was incredibly easy to use, and took hardly any time at all to perform the randomization of the slides. The only thing I wished was that I could choose the number of slides at the beginning to keep in place, as my activity has a title slide, a directions slide, and a helpful tip about groupings slide. I realized later that I should have just built my deck without those slides, randomized it, turned the auto-randomization off, and then added those three slides last, but at least I know for next time. I know most people don't automatically put math instruction together with ESL, but I have actually done quite a bit of it over the years. There's a lot of vocabulary in math, and it's an important subject for every student. I hope your students enjoy these fact practice games as much as mine. Happy teaching, everyone!
person has returned to the team, player two takes a stick and repeats the process. Play continues until all of the sticks have been placed in cans. I then quickly check the sticks in each can, giving teams one point for each correct placement (thus the different color sets of sticks). The winning team is the team who finished the fastest (I give three points to first place, two points to second, and one point to third) and most accurate (it happens fairly often that the slowest team actually wins the game due to increased accuracy).
Students love paint can questions, and usually beg to play again, and I almost always give in to them. This semester, and it's looking more and more like next as well, we are fully virtual. I enjoy the game as much as the students, so I really wanted to find some way to use it digitally. I considered a lot of options, including digital task cards, self-grading digital task cards, and even another cover up or board game, but really wanted something special for this activity. I finally settled on creating another mystery pixel art activity. I used the same questions as the paint can game, and themed the picture around color and painting (see image above). You can get either the Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel version of the mystery picture by clicking the picture and button above, or the links earlier in this sentence. Once we have worn ourselves out running back and forth, I like to play one more board game to practice asking and answering questions. Question Land is a game that is very loosely based on Candy Land. In the paper version students roll a number cube to see what question word they will use (the numbers and words are on the game board for easy reference). In the digital version, they use a specially scripted "Dice" menu to "roll" a question word. After discovering which question word a player will use, game play is the same for both versions. The student first answers the question asked by the previous player with a complete sentence. Then he/she asks a question of his/her own, using the word indicated. If the question is grammatically correct, the player moves his/her piece to the next square containing the question word he/she used. If the question was not grammatically correct, he/she stays in place. The first player to reach finish is the winner. The finally activity we use in our unit is another free download from my Teacher Pay Teachers store. Questions and Answers is a writing and speaking activity for up to six students (if you have more students simply make more copies of each page). Each page has three different questions with the words mixed up. In a separate square are the answers to the questions. Students must unscramble the questions and write them correctly in the provided space. Once students have all had a chance to unscramble and write their questions, they walk around the room, talking to one another. After finding a partner, they take turns asking and answering questions. At the bottom of each page is a place to mark if they were able to answer their partners' questions correctly or not. After students have asked their questions of five others, and answered the remaining 15 questions in the activity, they return to their seats. They count up how many questions they were able to answer correctly (all of the questions relate to USA history), and the student with the most correct answers is declared a winner. As stated before, you can download this activity for free by clicking the picture above, or the Questions and Answers links in this paragraph. By the time we finish all of these games and activities students have a good grasp on question words and how to use them. If you're looking for a quick way to grab most of these activities (you'll have to make your own beach ball and paint can set), you can use the buttons at the bottom of this post. Three different discounted bundles are available: paper activities only, digital activities only, and paper + digital activities. Happy teaching, everyone!
vocabulary to the definition, picture, answer, or anything else I chose to put on the other side. My question words match up card set has three different cards. The first card asks the students to match the wh– word with the type of answer it elicits and a picture. The second card asks students to match the wh– word with the correct question (there is a blank line instead of the wh– word). The third card asks students to match the wh– word with a short answer. Again, since we are virtual this semester (and it's looking more and more like next semester will be as well), I created a digital version of the match up cards. The digital version does not require the boards, but all of the matching items are the same. Rather than using rubber bands to indicate their matches, students stretch provided lines from one side to the other.
Once students have gotten relatively familiar with the question words and the answers they each produce, it's time for our first game. Beach Ball Questions is one of my students' favorite games to play, I think because they get to throw a ball around the classroom. All that is required to prep this game is a beach ball and a Sharpie marker. Blow up the ball and use the marker to write a question word in huge letters, one for each section of the ball. Allow the writing to dry, deflate, take to school, reinflate, and you are ready to play. Students gather in a circle and I start the game by tossing the ball in the air and catching it with two hands. Using whatever question word my right thumb is on, I ask a question before tossing the ball to another player. The person who catches the ball must first use a complete sentence to answer my question, then he/she asks a new question that begins with whatever word his/her right thumb is on. Play continues in this manner for as long or short as you like. I encourage students to not repeat questions, and sometimes I will help them think of one if they can't come up with something new. During our question word unit I keep the beach ball at school, and whenever we have an extra couple minutes at the end of class I'll grab it and we'll play for awhile. It's a great way to get out of our seats and practice our speaking and listening skills, as well as our question word vocabulary. The second practice game we like to play (which you can download for free using the links above or in this paragraph) is Escape! The Question Grid. The goal of this game is to move from one side of the grid to the other by asking and answering questions. Students choose one side of the grid (one student per side), and any question word on that side, from which to start. On a student's turn, he/she answers the question asked by the previous student, indicates which square he/she would like to claim (it must have at least one side touching a square which already belongs to the student), and asks a question using the word in the square. If the question is grammatically correct, the student uses his/her dry erase marker to color in the square on the laminated grid. The next player then takes his/her turn. Play continues until one student reaches the opposite side and escapes the grid. A digital version of Escape! The Question Grid is also available. In the digital version students must type their questions onto the provided rectangles, and then drag and drop the rectangle onto the square they are claiming. There is also a variant of the game that includes bridges. The bridges, limited to five per player, can be used to cross over a square previously claimed by an opponent. In order to deploy a bridge, a student must type a complete sentence answer to the question posed on the cover of the square he/she wishes to cross over. The use of the bridge constitutes the player's turn, but does open up more spaces for him/her to claim in the future. Though this game takes a bit more prep work than Beach Ball Questions, and can't be as easily used as a time filler at the end of a lesson, it is still a very fun practice game. I especially like it because we can play it over and over again since the questions and answers change every time. As I said in the beginning, these are only the resources, activities, and games I use in the initial stages of my question words unit. On Thursday I'll share some of the more advanced activities and games we use, including a couple more free ones. Happy teaching, everyone!
are on fry boxes, and the synonyms are on rectangles that I print on yellow cardstock to make the fries. The students must sort the fries onto the correct boxes, five fries per box, and be prepared to explain why they placed each fry where they did. Since some of the synonyms (such as dismal which can be sad or bad) could be matched with more than one word, it is the ability to defend their choices that takes this activity to the next level.
I am fully on line this semester, but I didn't want to forego this particular activity. My adult students especially appreciate it because so many of these synonyms are words they've never heard before. This prompted me to create a digital drag and drop version of French Fry Synonyms. Drag and drop activities are very easy to create, and my students have really enjoyed doing them. When creating a drag and drop activity, the first thing you need to do is decide what will be stationary and what won't. You want to create all of your stationary items, and then convert them into background images. Making all stationary items part of the background protects them from being accidentally moved, edited, or deleted. I prefer to do this in PowerPoint, in fact I do almost everything in PowerPoint. When I open PowerPoint, the first thing I do is adjust the size of the slide. You can do this by clicking on Design and Slide Size at the top. I vary my slide sizes for the different activities, but for this one I chose 17" x 11". PowerPoint will then ask if you want maximize or ensure fit of your slide elements. Since this is the first thing I do, it doesn't matter which I choose, but I always choose ensure fit, just so I'm in the habit if I ever change the size of a slide I've already designed. The second step in my drag and drop creation practice is to choose a background. You can find the Format Background option in the Design menu, or by right clicking on the slide and choosing Format Background from the menu that appears. I recommend that you choose something simple and not distracting. For this particular activity I chose a marbled look from my personal collection of pretextured backgrounds, hoping to create the illusion of a kitchen countertop. Often I will use the transparency slide in the Format Background menu to lighten the background. This helps my text and other elements to stand out a bit more. The final step is to click Apply to All at the bottom of the Format Background menu. Now the fun begins with the designing of the non-moving elements. For French Fry Synonyms I wanted a section with the fry boxes and a separate fry station (place for my fries that needed to be sorted). I also knew that I needed room above each fry box for students to place the synonym fries, so I decided to divide my sixteen overused words onto two slides. The fry station was easy to create, all I had to do was draw a straight line from top to bottom and add the text "Fry Station" at the top. To create the fry boxes, I searched Pixaby (great source for royalty-free, commercial use, no attribution required images) for fry boxes, and chose one that was simple. In order to remove the fries in the original drawing, I inserted the image into Photoshop, selected the inside of the fry box, reversed my selection, and hit delete. I was then able to fill the box with a red color, and save it as a .jpeg. Back in PowerPoint, I inserted the now empty red fry box, resized it, added a text box, and typed my first overused word. I was then able to copy and paste the box seven more times, move them around the slide, and change the word on each. To create my second slide, I opened the Insert menu, clicked New Slide, Duplicate Selected Slides. After changing the words one each fry box, I was finished. In order to covert my slides to images, I opened the File menu and clicked Save As. After choosing where I wanted the file saved, I changed the file type to .jpeg, clicked save, and chose All Slides. This created a new folder in my selected location, with a .jpeg file of each slide. The fries would ultimately be moveable elements of my activity, but I didn't want students to be able to edit (either by accident or on purpose) the synonym typed on each. In order to prevent this, I needed to create each fry as a separate image, one I'd be able to insert onto my final activity slides. Still in PowerPoint, I selected the Insert menu again, Shapes, and chose the rectangle shape tool. In my fry station (though it doesn't matter where you do this), I drew a rectangle, changed the color to yellow, double clicked inside it to add text, and typed my first synonym. After formatting the text and resizing to my liking, I copied and pasted the fry 39 times (eight fry boxes, five synonym fries per box, 40 fries total). I then went through and changed the synonym on each fry. To get my fries for the next slide, I selected all of the fries, copied them, and pasted them onto slide two. After changing the synonym on each again, I was done creating synonym fries. The final step was to save them as images by right clicking on each fry, choosing Save as Image, and giving it a name. I like to name my draggable elements by whatever word is on them so they are automatically alphabetized for me in my file. This helps later because when I insert the images onto the final slide they are inserted in alphabetical order, saving me the trouble of tying to figure out how to arrange them in "random" order. In this instance, since I have two different sets of draggable images, I added a 2 to the front of the second set so I could quickly tell each set apart. After all of this, it was finally time to create the final activity slides. I opened my Google Drive and created a new Slides file. Step one, as before, was to resize the slide by clicking File, Page Set Up, Custom. I then entered the same dimensions as before (17"x11"), and clicked Apply. It is very important to do this first so your background images (the unmovable parts of your activity) don't get distorted when you import them. When importing the unmovable background images, you can do it several ways. If you only have a couple of slides in the activity (such as with this activity), you can insert the background by right clicking on the slide, choosing Change Background, Choose Image, Browse, navigate to and select your image, Open, Done. You will need to repeat these steps for each slide. If you have a lot of slides (as I've had in other activities such as Too or Enough? or Context Clues Connect Four), I recommend using the Add-on Slides Toolbox. This Add-on allows you to import multiple images at a time, and set them as backgrounds on individual slides, with just a few clicks. It was a huge time saver for me! It is now time to insert the movable elements. To do this, click Insert, Image, Upload from Computer. You can then insert as many images as you like. If an image needs cropped (sometimes clear space will be added around the edges), simply triple click on it and use the black bars to move the edges in and out. Once all of the images have been cropped, select them all (ctrl+a), and create a single pile by clicking Arrange, Align, Center, Arrange, Align, Middle. Once all of the images are in a single pile, you can adjust the size by dragging the blue boxes. If you want to maintain your proportions, try holding down the shift key while you drag the corner boxes. You can also set the size manually by clicking Format, Format Options, and typing in the exact dimensions you would like. Once all of the pieces have been sized to your liking, arrange them in your holding area (fry station in this case). Your work will be automatically saved in your Google Drive. All that remains is to assign the activity to your students and let the fun begin! There are many ways to do this, and many of the specifics will depend on your LMS. When I did this activity with my adults last week, I copied and pasted the two activity slides enough times so each student would have his or her own set. I then put names on each slide so no one would be confused as to which slides were assigned to which student. Finally, I shared the deck with my students (giving them editing rights), and we all dived in. As the students worked on their individual slides, I moved from slide to slide, checking answers. If a fry was placed on the correct box, I drew a smiley face next to it. If a fry was not placed correctly, I either moved it back to the fry station (for obviously wrong answers, such as colossal for little), or asked the student for an explanation. Not all of my students have microphones that work well, so we like to use the built-in chat feature to communicate. If the student could give a defense of his/her choice that made sense, I added a smiley face; if not, the fry was returned to the fry station for resorting. They loved it, and as is typical for my adult students, they wanted to be sure they'd continue to have access to the activity so they could write all the words down for further study. There are many other ways to create and use drag and drop activities, but this is the method that works for me. My students really do enjoy them, and are very engaged while completing them. Besides in class activities, such as this one, I've also assigned them as homework, and provided some for extra practice. I hope you and your students will enjoy them as much as we do. Happy teaching, everyone!
the way they did. Once they have successfully ordered their words, and explained their reasoning, students then write the words (one per shade) on the paint chips, placing the weakest word in the lightest shade.
I like this project because it helps students understand that language can be very precise, as well as descriptive. The requirement to explain their reasoning behind the ordering of the words always leads to some interesting discussions, and more than once a student has put words into an order I initially disagreed with, but they made a convincing argument that won me over. I also like how they have to really dig into the synonyms, not just copy them from the thesaurus. You can't successfully rank words by strength, and defend your choices, without knowing what each individual word means, and how it differs in meaning from the other synonyms. Ultimately students end up considering the synonyms' definitions and example sentences, as well as other factors when making their choices. Ultimately this quick (the entire process takes one class period or less) activity produces a lot of learning!
When I was searching for Thanksgiving lessons beyond my stand-by readings and vocabulary from The ESL Teacher's Holiday Activities Kit, I decided to focus on The Know Nothings Talk Turkey for our reading comprehension work. In this book the four friends realize it is time for Thanksgiving, talk briefly about why we celebrate it, and then set out to have a true American Thanksgiving experience. They have a lot of adventures as they try to find and serve a turkey, but in the end are thankful to be together as friends.
In order to facilitate our reading, I developed a tri-fold brochure with questions for each chapter and a very short final comprehension check. Once printed and folded, the comprehension journal/brochure served as a bookmark, as well as a place to track their learning. Since so much of our lives has gone online this year, I created a digital comprehension journal for my online friends to use. The digital version includes all the same questions in a single slide deck with hyperlinked buttons for each chapter and the table of contents (first slide) for easy navigation. This lesson also provided yet another chance for my students to practice using the steps to comprehension (see previous blog post) that I'd taught them, though instead of underlining the sentences in the text I had them mark them with sticky-notes instead. The book is rather short, so we were able to read the entire thing, and complete our journal, in less than a week. The students really enjoyed the story and it was a great way to introduce them to some American Thanksgiving history and traditions. Happy teaching, everyone!
instruction, a set of posters displayed prominently in my room, and just a little bit of "torture," middle school teacher style.
One of the first poster sets I put up every year, and leave up all year, is my Steps to Comprehension posters. This is a set of seven footprints with the steps I teach my students to follow when answering any comprehension question. The first poster simply says, "Steps to Comprehension." Each of the other footprints lists a single step:
Once school begins I dive straight into explicit teaching and reinforcement of these steps. Before introducing and reading our very first piece of text for the year, I point out the posters and we talk about them. We read each step and talk about how doing this action will help us answer the question(s). I then introduce our text and model the steps, verbalizing the thoughts that go through my head as I am reading and comprehending a passage. We work through several texts over several days (weeks, months...) as a group, the whole time verbalizing our thinking/rational for what we're doing. I encourage the students to, whenever possible, underline the sentence(s) that help them answer the question and write the question number next to them. To be sure students are getting enough practice, I like to use daily reading comprehension practices as part of our morning/bell work. I have quite a collection of photocopiable books for this purpose, but two of my favorite publishers are Evan-Moor and Scholastic. As they begin working through the process on their own, students don't verbalize their thoughts as much, but I still require them to underline and number sentences to support their answer choices. As we go over the answers I will encourage students to share what sentences they underlined and why for different questions. Eventually, once students are proficient with the steps, and are consistently able to correctly answer various levels of comprehension questions, I allow them to choose if they want to continue underlining sentences or not. There is a caveat though (this is where the "torture" comes in), any student who does not complete a comprehension assignment with 90% (or whatever percentage I deem fair) accuracy or better, must correct his/her mistakes AND underline sentences in the reading. He/she is also required to underline sentences from the beginning for the next comprehension assignment. The students hate having to correct their mistakes, and most hate underlining the sentences to begin with, so it usually only takes enforcing this rule once or twice before all students are scrupulously applying the steps to comprehension. This simple set of posters and small adjustment to my lessons made a huge difference with my students. Students still get questions wrong from time to time, but nearly as often, and almost never a basic knowledge-level question that is answered directly in the text. The poster set can be downloaded for free by clicking the picture or link above. Happy teaching, everyone! |
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