Materials: Whiteboard/Blackboard, index cards (if desired)
Description: We call this game “The Money Game” because the concept of “Jeopardy” was too hard to explain. Anyway, it works just like the game show back home – students divide into two or three teams, and answer questions that are grouped by category (holidays, sports, sea animals, whatever) and progress from easy to hard depending on their dollar value (usually $100-$500). Sometimes the questions are a description (like, “What is the name of the holiday when Santa Claus brings presents?”) or a visual clue of a vocabulary word (a picture of an octopus, for example, or a pumpkin). I’ve even had a column of verbs for them to conjugate, with the irregular verbs being worth the most money.
You can either make a permanent set of questions with index cards, and teams keep the cards they answer correctly, or you can simply write the money values on the board and erase them as you go, keeping all the questions on your own piece of paper. The drawback to this activity is that you can really only use a question once (or maybe twice – once at the beginning of the year and once at the end), but they really enjoy the game and love it when I bring a new deck of cards in to play with. Usually, 5-7 categories are enough for one full class period.
Here is a sampling of categories that I’ve used: sports, holidays, food, sea animals, occupations, furniture, spell it, correct it (I read a sentence with a grammatical error in it, and they have to say the sentence correctly), songs and singers, nationalities, musical instruments, parts of the body, and famous Bulgarian song titles written in English.
-Abeth S.
Filed under: Level: Intermediate, Skills: Vocabulary
Abeth, thanks for putting up a site like this! When I finally have the Internet at home again, I’ll check in and hopefully even submit a few of the games my kids have enjoyed.
As for this game, it was my favorite when studying Spanish in middle school and high school. I didn’t realize it then, but Jeopardy is a great way to cover an array of grammar and vocabulary. Plus–as you said–it can cover an entire class period.
Yes, even my 10th graders (who are generally considered by the faculty to be the paralelka from hell) love this game. It’s also good because you can require entire class participation – every round a different student from each team must choose the category and give the final answer (with help from their team of course!) They get really competitive. My only problem with the game has been that the winning team usually thinks they deserve compensation in the form of 6s in the dnevnik! : )