Word Row Games

Rating

JHS, No prep, Active

How to Play

The basic shape of the activity is simple: you divide the students into teams, give each team a space on the chalkboard (or a sheet of paper, if you must), a rule to follow, and a time limit. They list as many vocabulary items as they can within the allotted time. The most common way is probably to give each team a stick of chalk and have them take turns writing on the board. When the time's up, stop them, count up correct words (and explain incorrect ones), and assign points. Simple. Most of the work involved in running this activity is going to be crowd control; try to keep the students from swarming the front of the room. Make sure that you have the teacher's desks cleared out of the space between the kids and the chalkboard!

How to Use

This is, obviously, a vocabulary-based activity. Usually I use this as a warmup or filler activity for short spans of time. An energetic team of students can generate up to twenty words in that time, so taking too long could run you into space limitations. After they've sat down, I go over the lists, checking spelling and so on and assigning points; usually it's just one point per word. Sometimes I'll give a bonus of some sort for long and/or complex words; make them worth two points, or give the student an extra sticker, and so on.

Occasionally, a student will produce a word that is technically correct, but clearly unintended. For example, they may write "reed" when they probably meant "read." In these cases, I'll challenge them to tell me the meaning of the word as spelled. If they can, it's full credit. Otherwise it's zero or half points, depending on how lenient I'm being with the class. First-year students will also get half a point for incorrect capitalization; this sort of thing varies depending on the class.

Notes

Most JETs know the version of this game called Shiritori, where you give each team a starting letter, and each subsequent word must begin with the final letter from the preceding word. (Example: English -hot -table -elephant and so on.) You can also ask them to list words of a particular type, such as verbs, words that start with the letter S, words for things at school, and so on.

One variety that seems to have gone particularly well is what I call "Word Train," or "Imitori." It works like Shiritori except that instead of basing each word on the previous one's final letter, you relate it in some way to the previous word's meaning. (English -math -difficult etc.) This one seems to go a bit more slowly; you can give them three to five minutes to write without being swamped, especially at the lower levels where the kids will spend a lot of time looking up words.

There are probably any number of other variants that could work. The basic concept is a game that involves all the students in equal and active roles, requires some physical involvement, and both draws upon and builds the students' English vocabularies.

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