Introduction

The game is called “The Mysterious Ball”. For this game the students and the teacher form a circle. During the game an imaginative ball is passed around with a certain adjective attached to the ball. The ball can be “hot” or “cold” or “heavy” or there can be some emotions attached to the ball like “happy”, “sad”. With the help of eye contact student A throws the imaginative ball to Student B. While throwing the ball student A announces the adjective of the Ball and acts according to that adjective. For instance, if the ball is “hot” they will try to pass the ball quickly while as the ball is “heavy” they would pretend to pass the ball with heavy effort.

Target Group

The game is highly dependent on the creativity of the students in creating new adjectives. Therefore, I would suggest playing the game after a vocabulary training unit or with grade 7 or higher to make sure that the students have the required vocabulary skills to develop their own adjectives.

Time

This game is good for a short and flexible 5-10 minutes. Since the joy of the game is dependent on the upcoming vocabulary the teacher can decide to end the game when there are no new words and ideas coming up or after all vocabularies of a certain list have been mentioned and practised.

Learning Objectives

The game is a good opportunity to repeat new vocabularies to memorize them. A good time for the game would be after a vocabulary unit.

Letting it run

It can be a good idea to let a student start with a word. This makes sure that the responsibility for creating new words does is not associated with the teacher role. However, if the students lack vocabularies, the teacher can either provide new ideas when receiving the ball or provide scaffolding help. The teachers Scaffolding help could point towards earlier teaching lessons or provide sentences like “Imagine the ball was cooked. What would it be…?” to make the students come up with words like “hot”.