Whenever I can, I try to move away from the traditional teaching format (teacher talks - student listens). As I teach, I keep improving ideas and techniques that I’d like to share with you in this post. One way to get away from the traditional format is to introduce a game or activity that lets students “navigate” the material indirectly, preferably in a fun way.
I’m going to talk about an activity called the Question Game.
- I prepare several questions, which can be multiple choice (a, b, c, d), true or false, or fill-in-the-blank.
- I glue the sheet with the questions onto a piece of poster board and then cut out the individual questions, making dozens of small cards, each with one question.
- Finally, I put all the cards into a nontransparent bag to build suspense. :)
How to play:
- First, I divide the class into two groups, which I call groups A and B.
- Then I play some music, and while it is playing the students pass the bag around. When the music stops, the student holding the bag must draw a question and read it aloud.
- Each question is assigned to a specific group. The first question goes to group A, the second to group B, and so on.
- If the group gets the answer right, it scores a point. If it gets it wrong, the other group gets the point.
These rules are just a starting proposal; they can and should be changed and adapted. In fact, these particular rules were created by the students themselves. It’s a good idea to involve them as much as possible.
Now there’s one small detail I want to tell you about.
To play the music, I made a program using Scratch that randomly selects one of two songs to play, sets the beats per minute between 60 and 100, and chooses the duration in seconds for each music segment—all at random.
It works well because I know that each round of music will last a different number of seconds, allowing the bag to move a little longer or shorter in each segment.
You can see an image of the program below. To run it, just click the image, which links to the Scratch page.
You can download, modify, and share your modification of the Scratch project; you just need to credit it as being based on my project. You don’t need to ask my permission for any of that :). The license is Creative Commons.
I hope you like it. If you have an idea you use to break out of the routine of traditional classes, please share it here and leave a comment.
See you later.