Matching Cards

Materials: premade cards on slips of paper or index card halves (see below for ideas)

Description: This is an easy way to work on almost any concept, and the cards can be easily stored for future classes and years. All you need to do is make sets of cards that illustrate the concept you’re trying to teach, as long as there’s enough cards for your maximum number of students.

Say, for example, you’re working on telling time. Then you’ll make one group of cards that has the time words on it (1:30, 5:50, 11:15, etc.) and a matching group that had the corresponding words on it (half past one, ten to six, quarter past eleven, etc.). The cards don’t have to be very big. Then, in class, you mix up the cards and give one to every student. Then everyone has to stand, walk around the room, and find the person with the corresponding card. It works better if you have students and their partners stand in one area of the room once they’ve found each other, so that the other students have an easier time finding their match. Then they can show you their cards and you can check for errors.

Besides time, you can make grammar cards (I, am, You, are), pictures and words to drill vocabulary, pictures and letters of the alphabet for beginning students (A, alligator, B, ball), questions and answers, or even just straight up Bulgarian-English cards. I have a set of about 100 of these that I’ve made, and when I’m feely particulary ornery with my 8th graders, I take the whole set into class and dump it into a big pile on the floor and tell them they can’t leave until all the words are matched up correctly. They don’t like it, and yet, they’re so compulsive, they can’t resist matching them up!

-Abeth S.