“The Forbidden Word”.
This activity is tought as a review and extension for the lesson “Jobs” in which we study the different professions people can do. We`ll work this unit in the 4th grade of Primary School, although we could use this dynamics for any theme in any course, always adapted to our students level.
The teacher will make a card with the vocabulary used in the lesson and a brief, simple description of every word. This material will be given to every pupil and it will be the base to work on the principal activity. Below we can see an example of the card related with our unit.
On the main activity, “The Forbidden Word ” the teacher will divide the class into four or five teams. The activity consists on two parts:
- On the first part the teacher reads every definition (literally or approximate, it depends on the level of the group) and the children have to guess the word he/she is referring to. When a team knows the answer, they can say it through word-turn. If they are right, they win one point, and if not, there will be a rebound.
- On the second part, every team choose two cards from a pile. They have 5 minutes to select a spokesperson and think about what definitions are the most appropriates to describe the words they have in the card. The spokesperson will say the definition and the other teams have to guess it. As the same way as in the part one, the teams will earn a point if they’re right and it will be rebounds. If there is no right answer, the “speaker team” will lose one point. It´s very important that the kids don't say the word they are describing.
The winner team will have an extra point in the test of the unit “Jobs”.
Here we have a table in which we can see a resume of the activity:
Time
|
Description of the session
|
15 minutes
Giving some explanation to
play “The Forbidden Word”.
|
-
The teacher distributes each
pupil a card with the vocabulary to study at home.
-
Simple description of the
next session.
-
The pupils will need 20
aditional minutes to study at home.
|
40 minutes (20 minutes per part)
Playing “The Forbidden Word”.
|
-
All the teams plays “The
forbidden word”. Two parts:
-
The teacher describes the
words.
-
A portavoz of every team
describes the words in their cards.
|
Resources.
This activity is perfect to those classrooms in which there aren’t resources enough. You just need some cardboard (for the chips) and folds.
Methods & learning techniques.
- Audiolingual method.
- Lexical aproach.
Objetives.
- Work with the specific vocabulary of each lesson and fix it on the context.
- Identify words we read with the ones we are listening to.
- Use of vocabulary.
- Work oral skills.
- Understand a text.
- Learn in a funny way.
