For middle school I have pretty low kids, and this semester they want me to focus on conversation. So for the first day back we talked about the answer to How are you? as I feel that is the most common greeting. Also, when I ask it to my kids in school in the hallway they always give me a blank look, or the standard "I am fine," robotic response.

So, we kept it simple today, and talked about emotions, good ones, bad ones, neutral ones, and made a list on the board and in their notebooks. I showed a few videos to the kids, depending on the level, because sometimes concepts like 'happy' can be abstract. Even though some of the videos are aimed at English speakers learning Korean, it was still helpful for the kids to associate the vocab.

Then we went around the room and asked each other "How are you?" and so on. We also went over, How was your vacation.

In then end there was this game. I have very small classes so we played a bunch of times. Basically I would ask the students "How are you?" and they would choose an answer. Click on the square and the picture behind it is pretty self-explanatory.

I give a lot of candy to these kids, so if they got the candy pic they got to come up and choose a piece of candy, but you can change that to whatever reward system you use. Also, I had one girl not want to choose between her two friends to sit down when she got the lightsaber, so I chose for her. Some kids can handle it as a game, others cannot.

It's a simple game, but the kids loved it. "One more time," like 3 times in a row, and we were all laughing when that one person picked an X on their first turn a bunch of times in a row.

Easily adaptable to other units or discussions. Hope someone finds all this useful.

Video Links
For straight, simple vocab: https://youtu.be/t0U7RMYo6xE
Longer, but still mostly vocab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4swnVDBhVaU
About 5 minutes, she talks about what "How are you" means, and her answers are more in depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaeiSM6y2_4

Thanks!!!