Okay, I’ll confess: we’re in the first days of the new course and I, the teacher, cannot for the life of me remember half my students’ names. Does this happen to you too? That moment when you point at someone and go “hey… you, yes, you, the one in the blue hoodie” because the name has completely vanished from your brain. A classic September moment. Well, and in my case, February moment, too.
So I started turning it over in my head (because yes, I have that habit of mine of turning any everyday problem into a classroom activity, it’s a blessing and a curse in equal measure) and I came up with something that kills two birds with one stone: we learn names AND we review grammar and vocabulary. Yay! Because why settle for one thing when you can have both, right?
And guess how I’m going to run it? Exactly how I like it: mixing tech and old-school tradition. Not fully digital, not fully analogue, a bit of both. But hey!!! You don’t like tech. It can all be done in the traditional way.
VOCABULARY ACROSTIC DUEL
Objective: learning students’ names and revising grammar and vocabulary.
Setting it up
- A WordCloud. Split the class into two teams and create two word clouds, one per team, with the names of their members. You can do this by hand on the board or you can bring in the tech like I do (because for this bit, I admit I’m a little lazy) and use Wooclap to generate the cloud on the spot. Well, two clouds, one per team,
- A buzzer. Some noise? Yes! Each team needs a buzzer within reach. A real buzzer, one of those that goes “ding!” and gives the whole thing that game-show feel that hooks everyone instantly.
How to play
(click on the image)
- Pick a student’s name at random from either word cloud (it doesn’t matter which team they’re on).
- Assign a challenge or if you use my wheel above, spin the wheel: for example, each letter has to be a past tense verb, or a descriptive adjective. You’ve got total freedom here to adapt it to whatever grammar point you’re working on.
An example with the name LUCAS and past tense verbs
- L – Learned
- U – Understood
- C – Called
- A – Asked
- S – Saw
3. Within each team, students can work solo, in pairs, or in groups of three, whatever they prefer.
4. As soon as someone finishes the acrostic, they hit the buzzer.Let’s say it is a student from Team A. If it’s correct, their team wins the round and crosses out a name from Team B’s cloud, and picks the next name plus the next grammar or lexical category.
NOTE: If the student from Team A makes a mistake, then the other team wins (Team B) wins and crosses out a name from Team A’s cloud
And so, round after round, and without even realizing it, they’re repeating names over and over while working on structure and vocabulary. By the end of the class, I promise even I’ll have picked up a few more names.
