A Vocabulary Bingo Game with a Touch of Tech

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Honestly,  not sure if there is anything more fun than turning a classic bingo into a language bingo. Ok, ok, rereading the sentence it is fair to question my fun scale. But I can assure you that it is going to keep your students engaged. That much I can promise.

Playing bingo in my classes is a classic. Not only the usual grid with numbers. The grid can contain pretty much everything and be used to revise almost all skills.

But today, it is going to be a vocabulary bingo with a touch of tech

This activity has two steps:

  1. Building the Word Cloud ( traditionally on the board or, in my case, using the free app Wooclap) https://www.wooclap.com/
  2. Playing Bingo
STEP 1.  Building the wordcloud.

This is a retrieval practice activity where students, using their mobile phones, revise vocabulary taught in previous lessons. In my case, I am teaching The Media and we played bingo with vocabulary from the newspapers and the media.

How to set the activity on Wooclap. Very easy!

  1. Go to Wooclap and register.
  2. Click on Create new event.
  3. Choose WordCloud and click Start Now.
  4. Share the link, the code or the QR Code with your students and Bob’s your uncle.

This video might help you follow these steps

Once the wordcloud is built, revise again pronunciation, form and meaning

And just because I like to play with tools, I have designed my own word cloud on a different tool just because I like the way words are highlighted. Click on the image to see it in action.

Step 2. Playing Bingo

Here we go!!!

One. Have students draw a grid on their notebooks: 3×2 ( 6 words) will work just fine. There should be significantly more words than squares in the bingo card. Ask them to choose any six words from the cloud and fill in the bingo squares.

The idea is to randomly give definitions for the words in the cloud. As students match definitions and words in their bingo, they cross them off. Bingo is shouted when all the squares have been crossed.

Note: Although you might think that everyone knows how to play bingo, trust me when I say several of my students had no idea how to play. So, explain that their goal is to cross all the squares in their grid before anyone else.

Two. How to play

This can be done in two different ways. One requires no preparation, the other one requires a little preparation. If you know me, I am sure you have guessed the one that I favour.

No preparation: randomly define the words in the cloud. I’d suggest keeping a record of the ones you have already done so as not to repeat the same definition twice. It can happen. Trust me.

Preparation: More fun. More drama. More everything.

  1. Write the words in the cloud on small strips of paper.
  2. Search your house for a  suitable bag and put the strips of paper in it. Draw a strip of paper at a time and give a definition for the word. You might need to repeat the definition twice. As students listen to the definition, they have a look at their grids. If they have a word matching the definition, they cross it off. The game continues until someone shouts bingo.
  3. Don’t forget to build suspense. It adds to the game.

A simple but very effective game.

Follow-up: 

  1. Ask a question or several and give students a strip of paper or several. When answering the question, they should try to use the word(s) on their strips.

How do you get the news in your country? Has the way of keeping up to date changed over the years?

Repeat procedure with as many questions as you want students to answer. Ask them to swap their words so that they get new ones.

2. In the next class, I am planning to play bingo again. Same steps but with a twist. This time, the students will draw the slips of paper from the bag and they will be asked to provide the definition.

Inspired by Serena’s blog choice of words.  Here you can revise taking her quiz.

 

 

 

Work: my Favourite Pictures to Spark Discussion

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…because a picture is worth a thousand words or so they say.

My plan is to show the pictures one at a time and encourage pair discussion and then whole-class discussion.  That’s the magic of a good visual.

Source: Getty Images

Source: Knoff

 

 

Note: I don’t know the source for some of these pictures. In most cases, they have been uploaded to Pinterest and I have stored them in Topic-based folders.

Should the author of any of these pictures require attribution, kindly let me know.

My Crystal Ball is Cloudy. Ask Again! A Game to Practise Making Predictions

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Fun, interactive and engaging! More?

  • It deals with grammar: the future tense for predictions
  • Students practise asking questions
  • It requires little preparation

Context:

Tell the students you’re a gipsy and that you have the ability to tell their future.  Tell the students they can only ask you one question, so they have to choose carefully what to ask you. (If students are not very confident, ask them to write their questions. On second thoughts, ask them anyway even if they are confident).

The Activity

Now, ask students one by one to ask you their questions. Ask the student posing the question to choose a number, any number up to the number of cards you have created.  Then, shuffle the cards and lay them face down on the table. If they have chosen number 4, place three cards face down on the table and, with a lot of drama, the card which comes fourth face up on the table. This is the answer to their question.

Possible words on the cards?  Yes, it is in the cards/No way/ It’s not likely/ Not a chance/ Absolutely/ Most certainly, no!/Not in this life!/ Most decidedly so!/If you play your cards right/Not in the immediate future/My crystal ball is cloudy, ask again!

  • Laura: Will I be rich?
  • Fortune Teller: No way!
  • David: Will I pass all my final exams?
  • Fortune Teller: Yes, it is in the cards

CARDS : template,PDF

Note: I have been playing this game for a long, long time and I can’t honestly remember if I invented it or someone else did and was passed on to me.

A Short Descriptive Writing Activity with a Touch of Pasta

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Hello February! What? Already almost mid-February?

It took me most of the second half of January to assess my students in the five skills required to certify their level but now I welcome February with open arms and with the aim of letting loose a bit and doing activities that are a little bit more fun than assessing students. It shouldn’t be too difficult LOL.

Also, I have to confess, and from what I gathered from their marks in exams,  I might not be doing enough writing. So, I have started February with the aim of planning some time in my classes to give my students some short writing activities.

Here we go with one of them and….. you are going to need PASTA.

  • Topic: Describing scenery
  • Level: C1
  • Skills and subskills: vocabulary and writing
  • Aim:
  • Learning vocabulary
  • Writing a short descriptive paragraph
  • Peer correction
  • Having fun ( I can feel your scepticism right through my computer screen LOL but be assured I will never lie to you)
Introducing Vocabulary

Step 1: Brainstorming

Put students in pairs and ask them to write in 1 minute all the words they can think of related to landscape and scenery.

Get feedback and give enthusiastic applause to the pair who has written the most items. At this point, it does not really matter if the words are below the advanced level. Let them have some fun but, on the board, write only the ones that are a bit more advanced ( for ex: I wouldn’t write the word “tree” but I would write the word “ridge”).

Step 2: Introducing Vocabulary

Hopefully, in the brainstorming activity above, students would have come up with some of the words in this exercise.

  1. Introducing. Do the exercise a couple of times, change templates, and give students the time to write down the words.


2. Clarifying. Some words might cause confusion; these are the ones I have clarified.

Same, Same, But Different Worksheet by cristina.cabal

3. Reinforcing. Silently assign a word to every student in the class and ask them to write a definition for the word and then have them read it aloud for the class to guess.

The Writing Activity

On the board write some verbs they might want to use: scramble down (the cliff), stray from(the path), stick to (the path),  (the road) wind along, ( a road/ridge) lead up or any other you feel they might need.

Step 1: Writing. Individual work

Ask students to choose one of the photos above and write a short descriptive paragraph on a separate piece of paper. Encourage them to use the target vocabulary ( but don’t let them know at this point that they will be rewarded for their choice of words). Allow 12-15 minutes for this task.

Step 1: Peer assessment. Using the pasta as a reward

  1. Once they have all finished writing, ask students to swap descriptions with the student sitting next to them.
  2. Place a bowl of pasta on the table. A bowl for every two students works fine. Say nothing about it. Students will surely ask you but say nothing. Not yet.
  3. Tell students to read their partner’s writing underlining the target words they have used: it could be nouns, adjectives or adverbs.
  4. Tell the students to circle words spelt incorrectly.
  5. How do you use the pasta? The pasta is used as a reward. For every new word used correctly, the student assessing the writing takes a piece of pasta  (misspelt words get no pasta).  With as much drama as possible, perform the award ceremony where students give and receive as many pieces of pasta as words they have used correctly.
  6. Ask the three students who got the most pieces to read out their descriptions.

Create your Own Wordle Game

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Yes. I am sure you have all heard about the latest craze in word games. No? You haven’t heard of Wordle? Well, if you haven’t, you missing out.

If you have played and loved but discarded Wordle as a teaching tool, I am here to show you there is a great alternative. Keep on reading!

Created by a software engineer called Josh Wardle, Wordle is a word game and it has become so popular that it has even been verbed  and people are beginning to say “have you wordled today?”

But, how do you play?

  • The idea is that you need to guess the Wordle in 6 tries.
  • Each word must be a valid 5-letter word
  • After each guess, the colour of the tiles will change to show how close your guess was to the word. Green if the letter is in the correct spot; yellow, if the letter is in the word but not in the correct spot and grey if the letter is not in the word in any spot.

Anyway, the game is fun to play but as a teacher, I thought it was maybe a bit too difficult for my students. Sometimes the words to be guessed are “knoll” or “crimp”. So, fun for me but I could see no use for the game in my classes as the words to be guessed were either too difficult or not relevant for the content I was teaching.

But, thanks to Tony Vincent and his awesome blog  learninginhand.com, I learned there is a Wordle you can easily customize with the words you need. How cool is this to use as a warmer, stirrer, filler or cooler?

The website is called mywordle.me and was developed by Pallav Agarwal. It works as explained above as regards tile colours. What’s different?

  1. You can customize your own word
  2. It can be 5 or 6 letters long
  3. You can do as many as you want
  4. You can share the link with your students and they can all play at the same time.

Next class? Start with a Wordle game to revise vocabulary.