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I choose a word in my mind and a gesture to match with that word. Everybody in the circle has to repeat the word and the gesture with me. The following next person will have to repeat my word and gesture and add a new word and gesture, which has something to do (in the word field or association of ideas ) with the last word.
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During the second session with the kids, the group was made of 4 pupils (2 boys - 2 girls). I thought that their English level was much better than last week. They knew a lot of vocabulary and understood the idea of a word field much better.
Learning objectives
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- to make the kids move
- to create associations of ideas between different words, which are usually not put together
- to help the kids remembering new words
- create creative movements
- develop kin-aesthetic kinaesthetic memory
Instructions to set up the activity
When someone is saying a word, he has to do a gesture which represents the word according to him. Everybody has to repeat after him the word and make the gesture with him. When the person after the last one in the circle is talking, she has to say the last word, do the gesture and say a new word with a new gesture. The words have to be linked with each other.
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During the first week, the first difficulty comes came out. The kids played but I guess that they didn't really understood the game or I didn't explain it well enough. They were just repeating words after words and these were not linked with each other. I guess they were just saying what they had in mind at that moment (like football->handball->school->boxing->ice cream).
The second time with the second group was much better: I improve my explanation. The pupils were also better in English and immediately understood immediately the goal of the game.
I made three different levels beginning from the easiest going to the hardest. In the first level, the world field was given and it was "animals". The gestures were really creative and easy to remember (like saying cat and going on the ground saying "miaow"). According to me, this level was easy for them because they could easily remember the movements. They learned a few new words like "squirrel" or "snail".
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I think that an important difference was also that they there were only 4 pupils and with two helpers and me , we were also able to help quickly if that was necessary.
Something that I also add added because I saw that the kids were really good at the game was repeating alone at the end.
At the end of each level, I picked one or two pupils to repeat all the whole words and gestures and that went really well. They were able to remember the whole list.
To put it in a nutshell, this game could can be used with different levels of English. You could also play it with word fields that you saw in class with your pupils or even grammar rules.
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