Author Topic: theCategoryGame v 2.0 (Read 1320 times)

toddsqui · « **on:** October 02, 2015, 03:47:28 PM »

In this game, students learn new words and then put them into different categories.

There are 104 slides in this presentation.

I'm guessing this oughta keep the little tots busy.

Best,

-T

toddsqui · « **Reply #1 on:** October 13, 2015, 05:34:11 PM »

Today this game was tried on a group of first and second graders in a Korean middle school, co-ed.

Some helpful observations, current as of 2015:

(1) Students did not know the following words: Criteria, Categories, Essential, Useful, Thread, and Rubber

(2) Doing only one round of this game took about 20 minutes (this includes the explanation that you and your co-teacher will provide)

(3) Students became bored a little bit when flipping through all of the slides for the vocabulary.

(4) White boards were used for the students to categorize the words. Some students were responsible and did the assignment. Others doodled. And still, some members of different groups monopolized the entire white board for the group, without giving other students a chance to participate.

(5) The pictures were easily understood.

(6) The timer is triggered immediately when you flip to the next slide. I forgot about this and then continued speaking about the assignment, providing directions, despite the fact that the timer continued to countdown. For those of you interested in doing this assignment, you'll want to provide directions BEFORE you reach the slide with the timer.

(7) One slide says "There are no correct answers." Because this is middle school, my co-teacher and I thought it would be too much of a hassle to explain this idea to the students so we just skipped over this slide for the sake of expediency.

For those of you considering doing this PPT, I would advise that you remove some words to reduce the time. I'm sort of on the fence with whether i would give this PPT to a group of middle schoolers (again). Would love to read other people's experiences with this PPT.

Hope this helps.

-T

dstew123 · « **Reply #2 on:** October 13, 2015, 09:35:58 PM »

I did this game with my most advanced middle school classes (still pretty average to low level compared to other schools), and it wasn't much of a success. They didn't really get into because it isn't inherently competitive and they couldn't grasp the concept of "no right answers." Some groups tried but others were lost, which required me to spend way more time explaining directions and concepts again instead of helping other groups or monitoring for behavior.

Overall, I decided I won't be doing this activity with my middle school classes again, unless it was a motivated club class of less than 10 students, then I might make them do it individually.

Unless your middle schoolers are very high level and mature, I feel this activity is better geared towards high school students, even with scaled down vocabulary.

Hope that helps someone!

-David

toddsqui · « **Reply #3 on:** October 14, 2015, 02:56:13 PM »

David- Awesome feedback! Thank you so much for this! I think your post will really help all of the middle school teachers hangin' around Korea better prepare for their classes, for sure!

I also tried this lesson today with my high schoolers(1st grade).

I had eight students and I broke them up into groups of two. Each group had a white board and some markers and then had to categorize the words within the span of five minutes (as per the directions in the PPT). Then, once the five minutes was up, I held up the white boards and had the other groups challenge the group whose white board I was holding. I said something like...

"If you don't agree with one of these words being categorized the way they are, please say so,"

And then each group proceeded to make a challenge while the defending group had to provide reasons for why they categorized the word as they did (modeled after the slide in the PPT).

It took my students awhile to understand what they were doing but by the end of the class, they were getting into the idea of "Debating" and seemed to enjoy the feelings the game inspired.

Still, you have to be really careful when doing this because there was one particular group I remember from today that didn't know how to defend themselves properly so they just resorted to personally insulting the other groups, making fun of their facial features, etc. Obviously, you want to avoid this at all costs. I would go so far as to say if you think your class is likely to do this, then just avoid the activity altogether because such comments can be really hurtful, even to me (who doesn't even experience the comments firsthand).

There were also other groups who had members that just monopolized the white board or the talking or both, so I intervened when necessary to try and create harmonious involvement among all participants. I think in the end my interventions were appropriate.

All in all, I probably will try this game again on high schoolers, but definitely not middle schoolers because they just don't seem to have the attention span for it. Not even the most mature of middle school students.

Oh well, you live and you learn.

Thanks again, Dave! I appreciate the feedback!

Sincerely,

Todd

Author Topic: theCategoryGame v 2.0 (Read 1320 times)

toddsqui

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