English Quiz

Today we did not get pancakes. It was incredibly disappointing during the early morning after a weekend of relaxing. We did get fried egg and rice though, so it wasn’t a bad consolation prize.

My only lesson today was with G.12 and all we did was play games. It was great. We began with hot potato, which was primarily meant for just practicing ‘dream house’ vocabulary, but they loved it so much that we used different topics as well. Sadly I didn’t win, but I came in the top 3. When the game did finish I began to set a task up on the board only to find that none of the students had their books because they expected that they were going to the rice fields. So I stuck the task on hold and we played another game: Pictionary. Once they understood what they had to do (all credit going to Aum) they loved the game. Even if I had to reiterate that the drawers weren’t allowed to talk. They enjoyed the game so much that they wanted to carry on playing even when the lesson ended. I’ll have to work that game into another lesson at some point.

Today was the first day that we were taking or even participating in English Quiz, so we did not know what to expect. Apart from that there were 55 members. So whatever we planned had to be planned for about that many students, which is about double a normal class size!

We had a bit of trouble setting my laptop up to the projector for our amazing PowerPoint, but thankfully one of the students from my G.12 class managed to sort it out. Once we set it up we decided to start since we were quite late already, despite the fact that students were still piling in. It was quite difficult to split the students into 6 groups and get them to stay in their groups, but I think we managed most of them well. Kate did most of the talking for the quiz as my voice was a bit croaky by then. We found that the quiz questions were a bit hard for them, so they would need adjustment. But the following rounds of Pictionary and Charades were thoroughly enjoyed by everyone. We even managed to get some of the shy younger students to join in. Alternating what groups drew and acted, and allowing all the groups to guess worked really well. We decided that the first to put their hand up (not shout out) was the person who answered. The mixture of movement and noise did make deciding a bit confusing, but I feel we dictated the game fairly. Handing out points cards was also a good idea. By physically giving a group a token as a reward, they got a sense of achievement and it meant we could double-check out own scores that we noted down. All in all I felt it went really well, and hopefully it will be just as successful in two weeks’ time when we do it again.

Oh, and apparently we did not get pancakes today because there were no bananas. But we will get them tomorrow.