Thursday, March 9, 2017

Ekeko - Day 8

Today we played a reading game that I heard about on the Facebook group. I copied the text of the post, but I can't remember who the author was! If anyone remembers, please let me know!

"Sometimes I play a reading game that I think I invented. It goes like this: divide class into teams of 3-5 players. Give everyone the same reading. As a team they have to read and make sure everyone understands the reading. Then at the front of the room I have 1 chair for each team with a whiteboard. One member of each team comes up, (so there's 6 or so representatives up front, and I'll ask them a question in Spanish about the reading. They all write their answer on the board, and they show me when I count to three. Everyone who is correct is eligible for points- now the fun part: I have a deck of cards, and each person with a right answer gets to draw a card which represents their points (ace=1 point, every thing else is worth card's value, and any face cards= 10 pts) then all the representatives return to their team with their card, another rep goes up front and we begin again with the next question. This game is great for a few reasons: I ask questions in order of the text, so kids are re-reading before their turn to try to predict my question, no one really knows how many points the other teams have, so no one gives up."

I gave students a set of comprehension/discussion questions for Chapter 5, pages 31-35, and told them to read extra carefully, because we were going to play a game and they'd need to know the text really well.

This worked like a charm. Students worked extra hard in their groups to read and re-read the text and make sure everyone was understanding. Several groups even went back and reviewed the other chapters to make sure they were clear on those, too.

One problem arose - a few groups really struggled with the text of this chapter. A lot of the issue was lack of background knowledge. Some groups sailed through with no problem, but other groups didn't know:
1) How a letter works - whose name goes at the top and whose goes at the bottom.
2) The meaning of English words like "generosity" "abundance" "good fortune" and "ceramic"
3) Why the native Bolivians might have had a conflict with the Spaniards (I know they learned about the Spanish conquistadors and colonization in their world civilization class, but apparently it didn't stick).

Those groups needed a lot of help. Do you guys assign mixed-ability groups so that some kids can help others, or do you let them choose their own?

The game was a lot of fun. We played for about 20 minutes. I changed just a couple of things - I made aces worth 15, mostly because I couldn't remember if they were supposed to be high or low. I also named the game "Silla caliente" to make it seem more like a real game show. Other than that, I used the rules from the Facebook post, and it was great! The luck aspect really kept everyone engaged and trying to study up between rounds, because they knew they had a chance to catch up. It was also an excellent way to judge their comprehension, which was by and large very strong. The one exception was my 8th period, so we're going to go at the text a different way tomorrow. One last note - make sure you have at least two decks of cards available.

1 comment:

  1. Your game is AnneMarie Chase's Lucky Reading Game, described in her blog. https://senorachase.com/2018/03/20/the-lucky-reading-game/

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