Games: Show-and-Tell

There's been a lot of discussion on Ben Slavic's PLC (it costs about $5.00 a month, and the community that comes from it really is worth it) about games not really promoting CI, and that's pretty true. A lot of games do not promote good comprehensible input, discussion, reasonable output or communication. A lot of it is just spitting out of words or grammar without any context. So I've spent the last couple of years putting together games that do encourage CI, encourage conversation, useful input.

There are people who argue that there's little point in asking the kids to produce at all in front of a class because any input for the rest of the class that's not correct is damaging. I don't think that's necessarily true - I think forcing kids to output can just be dangerous because they aren't always ready and so it stresses them out and upsets them.
So when I go to play games that require my students to output, I have to make sure that



(a) I have scaffolded to the game appropriately. That is, the questions or tasks presented in the game are tasks of which my students are capable, they've been prepared for them, they have heard me use them frequently and consistently, and they understand them.

(b) It's a differentiating game and allows students to work at their own level. If I'm asking my barometer kid (the one I keep an eye on because he struggles most - he's the one I need to make sure, all the time, understands what's going on, because if he's okay, the rest are probably okay) to perform at the level of the top kid in the class, it's going to go badly for a couple reasons. The first is that the kid can't perform at that level. The second, resulting from that, is that the student will feel dumb and stressed out, won't want to come to class, and won't make progress. On top of that, it'll frustrate the class.

(c) The game is worthwhile and is asking my students to do something that will contribute to repetition and to their progress, rather than just the spitting out of non-contextual pieces of memorized information.

(d) The students have support. When we pit the students against each other with no team for support, they don't do well. Imagine standing on a tightrope wire with nothing beneath you, and 35 of your friends and frenemies :) watching you. That is the position it puts them in. If they're going to have to answer on their own, it should be under certain conditions. I aim to have two of these in any game:
-it's noisy in the room and so their speaking is partner-directed and the larger group cannot hear or judge them
-it's on a completely volunteer basis
-the group is cheering for them, not against them
-they have the support of their notes or of texts they've been reading, or the ability to ask questions

Today, a 'game' called show-and-tell! Keith Toda calls these activities, not games, so the kids under-expect, and then when it's fun, that's awesome. :)

Show and Tell: 

I use a document camera for this, but if you don't have one, you can simply draw on the whiteboard or have some prepared pictures. The linked one is my department's (one is provided to each department at my school), but it's pretty cheap, if you want one and don't have access to one right now.

Students are in pairs. One student faces the front (or wherever your board is); the other faces away. Between the two of them, the pair has a whiteboard and a marker. I have giant white boards (I got them at CostCo for $20, they come with markers and a magnetic eraser, and I love them, but mini whiteboards work just as well. These can be gotten at Target or, more easily - Home Depot sells huge sheets of white board, and they'll cut them up for you if you ask. Very sturdy, cheap and don't need to be replaced much).

The person who isn't facing front holds the board and marker. It is the job of the person who can see the front and what you're drawing to describe the picture to their partner. The kid with the board and marker is drawing what they hear.

Meanwhile, I've got my own little whiteboard which I've put under the doc cam, and I'm drawing something I'd like them to describe - a house with a person hanging by their foot upside down; a person wearing various pieces of clothing and dancing in the night through the street around a tree. Etc. I've drawn some pretty fascinating pictures (scilicet!), generally trying to incorporate the vocabulary we've been doing recently and pull in some older stuff. Sometimes they use the words I was aiming for; sometimes they go somewhere else.

My students really rose to the occasion when we tried this. There were mistakes flying around the room like crazy, but that isn't really the point. It was my pleasure to be able to walk around and listen to them, particularly those I know to be barometer students, and guide a little, offer some words, or just listen in. They begin to talk around things they don't remember how to say, which is a pretty cool thing to listen to them do.

Because this requires a relatively high level of production, I would not do it with a first year class at the beginning of the year (I did this with my first years in May), and I wouldn't do it with a class that hasn't had a LOT of input and isn't used to talking.

The kids felt relatively safe here because they knew the only person who could hear them was their partner. They could talk at the level at which they were able, and it also gave them a lot of control - their partner was their puppet. The drawing kid didn't have to do anything but listen and draw, and he had the ability to ask questions of his partner. Either could have asked questions of me (and many did).

At the end, just for kicks, one of my kids wanted to draw under the doc cam, so I employed the entire class in describing his picture for me. It was a pretty nutty picture - something about a turkey and a bazooka. My kids know neither of those words, so the class effort resulted in animal homo edit die gratias (sic) and instrumentum necat et dicit BAM generis bazooka (sic).

That, too, was a safe thing for them (even though there was stuff in D's picture the kids couldn't identify in Latin) because they weren't being forced to talk. The ones who spoke up were the ones who felt okay speaking up.