Humanistic Teaching

An approach to learning English

This is another quick flashcard activity for small groups. It's more useful for review than for learning new vocabulary. Apart from a set of flashcards it requires a timer and a dice. A basket to collect won flashcards is also handy. In this game the group see how many cards they can name within two minutes. The game element comes from the use of the dice. Players take turns rolling the dice and the number rolled indicates how many cards they must get - so a roll of 3 means they must identify 3 cards,  a roll of 5, 5 cards and so on. Since I'm usually sitting I keep the cards in my lap and count off the number required and hold them up. If the group can name all the cards they go into the won pile. If there is a miss I name the remaining cards and shuffle all the cards for that round back into the deck. When time is up we count the number of won cards and make a record as a target for next time.

This game could be played competitively with students naming and keeping the cards individually. I've never done this, nor would want to. Why make something competitive? I sometimes ask players to name cards individually while keeping a group score. This is usually combined with the whispering rule. Other players may whisper an answer to the player whose turn it it. But it must be a whisper that the teacher cannot clearly hear or the cards are lost. This can sometime mean a group must pass a whisper around the table depending upon who knows the answer.

When looking at game rules it is important to consider whether the rules promote information exchange or inhibit it. Playing All Or None individually with the whispering rule encourages the sharing of information. The same game played competitively wouldn't. It would be possible to put players into teams and have team members whisper to each other but this wouldn't have quite the same level of information exchange and also would do less for building class rapport as a whole.

I'll close with a game variation. As Carla mentioned in her blog entry: English for engaging with English speakers children need to learn more than just words. An alternative to naming flashcards is to come up with a number of words/mini phrases to describe one flashcard. So for example if the card in play showed a picture of an elephant and 6 was rolled a word list might be: grey, big ears, long nose, four legs, thin tail, Africa. For more able students these could be turned into complete sentences, though in this case a longer time limit works better.

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