I have several students who spend their lunchtimes in my room, and I like to watch them and see what games they play, either verbally or on their phones, in their downtime. It tells me what they like to do, and that means I can sometimes design activities around the things they do in their free time. Our students are always more willing to do something compelling to them, and nothing is more compelling than stuff they do in their lives of their own volition. When we can incorporate our students' lives into our classrooms, we not only interest our students further, lending to their progress and buy-in, but we become more in tune with them as people, too. Something some of my older students like to do is a clapping categories game called Concentration 64 that lends itself BEAUTIFULLY to a language class.
There's a chant and a handclap that go along with it. This is a (pretty adorable, admittedly) video of some small children demonstrating the way it works. It's about a minute and a half. We put the chant in Latin and shortened it pretty significantly to:
operam da noli iterare
ne haesita
tracta(n)tur __(topic)______
We started with categories like res, colores, animalia, etc. But my uppers have been talking about medicine and humors, so today we were reviewing blood and phlegm, as well as innards, so those were the categories they worked with. I divided the class into two teams (although you could do more - you can play with more than two people at a time) and chose one person from each team. I called the category. The person who won the round got to sit down and earned a point for their team. The person who lost the round had to stay up until they won a round and earned a point. You can do this for vocabulary or just for information. I got answers for blood like in corde tenetur or purgetur rene as well as calidus, umens, ruber. It was a lot of fun, and the kids wanted to keep playing because it's something they like to do anyway.
Comments