Musical Chairs

No one is too old for musical chairs.

My Latin I students have recently acquired what feels to them (and probably is) like a huge amount of vocab, so what's been called for recently is (a) making sure they have it and (b) reviewing some more subtle stuff. I don't even teach numbers, for a couple reasons:

1. They come up all the time, so it sticks much better if we just use them whenever they're necessary.
2. They're just not all that interesting, so much better if we just use them whenever they're necessary. For example, when we learned pen, we also learned that there are a LOT of people in my fifth period who carry around an absurd number of pens. So we counted them all. One kid on a regular basis has 25 pens. Why? Don't know. But now the whole class knows something about her, and we can count to twenty-five.

Anyway, musical chairs.

I have a small collection of music in Latin, which I always play when we play musical chairs. We set up enough chairs in the classroom in a giant circle that everyone can have a chair and - here's the catch - never remove any of them. Each kid gets a little whiteboard, and I have them write the word on them rather than doing it myself. It gives them the exercise in writing in a safe way.

The students sit in a circle with their labeled whiteboards (today: volcano, stand up, chair, black, sit down, ceiling, bring, white, red, etc.). I begin the music. They walk in a circle. No one leaves the circle. However, when I turn off the music, they can sit in any chair they want - even if it's nowhere near them.

Then I go around the circle and ask each of them a question as they show their board. Today the questions were:
1. what does it mean?
2. show me (either literally or with hand signs)
3. how do you pronounce?
4. how do you spell?
5. how many letters are in?

Thus we practiced the vocab, the visual/kinesthetic association with it, asking questions, pronouncing while looking at a word, the alphabet, and numbers.

For upper levels, I also like use in a sentence, give a synonym/antonym, whom does this describe (in a text), etc.

If the kids get something wrong, we don't pull out a chair. That kid goes and sits either outside the circle or in the middle - depends on your class, because you really don't want to shame your kids - with a sheet of paper. On that paper, they keep track of all the words anyone misses, with the definition or answer to the question...until they can answer a question someone missed. I.e. if Thackeray misses quid significat vulcanus  and Lucient (who is out) raises his hand and says, "Volcano!", Lucient will give his list to Thackeray, who will sit out/in the middle and continue the list, and Lucient will sit in Thackeray's seat.