Saturday, November 21, 2015

Guess the Idioms

Hi. I'm Aliya Khairuddin. Each of us has been assigned to prepare a lesson plan for a language game of our own choice. While choosing the games, I recalled the games that have been carried out during my teaching practical and during micro-teaching sessions in UTM. I considered doing Bingo, but since that have been carried out once, and most of my friends are familiar with it, I thought of getting other alternative. I googled for some language games on the internet and found several games on idioms. This reminds me of my school days, where we played a lot of language games in during Language Month. Therefore, I had the idea to adapt one language game from one of the game sessions in my English language class.

Here is the lesson plan of the game that have been adapted:

Guess the Idiom
Language: Idioms, Vocabulary
Skills: Speaking
Control: Free
Level: Beginner (Year 5 and Year 6)
Time: 30 minutes
Materials: Paper strips with idioms written, five (5) small boxes, whiteboard/sketch book   and marker
Theme: Nature

Preparation:
A list of 50 idioms is prepared. Each idioms are written in a paper strip. The idioms are then put into boxes, with 10 paper strips for each boxes. The boxes will be given to each groups.
Before the game started, the students will be given a list of idioms with its meaning. They can read the idioms first to familiarize themselves with the idiom, to help them guess the idiom better.

Procedure: 
Group work
The game is played in two rounds. For both rounds, each groups are given 2 minutes. When it is a group’s turn, one member of the group will have to draw one paper strip from the box, read the idiom silently and illustrate the idiom on the whiteboard. The member may illustrate the idiom word by word. Then, the other members need to guess what the idiom is. If the idiom is correctly guessed, the paper strip will be taken out of the box. If it’s wrongly guessed, the paper will have to be put inside the box again.
This procedure will be repeated for other paper strips of idiom until the 2 minutes have ended. Then, the next group will do the same. After the first round have ended, the first group will start the second round again, followed by the other groups. For the second round, the game will only be played for 1 minute and 30 seconds for all groups. At the end of the second round, each groups will count how many paper strips are put outside of the box. The group with the most paper strip out wins.

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Basically, in this games, the students need to draw out the idioms. In the original game, the students need to act out the words from the idiom. There is one important thing to do before playing this game in class, which is to expose the students to the idioms in previous classes. This is because idioms are difficult to remember, hence using unfamiliar idioms in this game will make this game difficult.

That is all from me. Thank you :)


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Personally, I think that this game of yours is quite helpful because I remember during my school days, idioms will make your writing become brilliant or 'bombastic'. But I think it's difficult for students to grasp all the different idioms. Therefore, this game is perfect to cater this issue.

Unknown said...

This game is really interesting. Students' would have to think critically and try to connect pictures that have been drawn in order to identify the idiom.