Introduction

Hello everyone !

My game's idea was to create a circle with the kids and use the help of two other students, who were helpers to present the game with me. 

The game is like the one called in German "Pack dein Koffer". 

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 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.

Here is an example: I said coffee and made a gesture which represents a cup. Everybody in the circle repeat the word coffee and replay the gesture. The person on my right repeats coffee and my "cup gesture" and goes on with another word linked to it. 

Target group and time

The group was composed of 5 pupils: 3 boys and two girls and two students helpers. The kids were in the 5th grade. I would say that one of the boys was a "leader" and wanted to talk and participate a lot and one of the girls was really shy and didn't dare asking for words as much as the others.

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

The goals are:

• 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 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 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.

For example:

• I say coffee and make a gesture representing a cup of coffee
• everyone in the circle repeat the word and gesture together
• the next one repeats the word and gesture
• he adds a new word and gesture
• everybody repeats 
• and so on until each person in the circle had said something.

Letting it run

During the first week, the first difficulty 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 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". 

As a teacher ruling the game, it's a good idea to say new words as an input. 

The second level was with the word field of ice cream flavors. According to me, this level was a little bit harder because of the gestures. The gestures were really hard to create and remember. (Could you think of a different gesture for "chocolate", "vanilla" or "caramel" for example? )

The last level was without giving them a word field at all. We were just using the words associations with what we had in mind at the very moment. The  pupils understood perfectly and said words which were linked to each others. 

I think that an important difference was also that there were only 4 pupils and with two helpers, we were able to help quickly if that was necessary. 

Something that I also 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 words and gestures and that went really well. They were able to remember the whole list. 

To put it in a nutshell, this game 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. 

Have fun !