::A Geek in Korea::

Seeing as how I’ve completed all of the text books for the last semester, and have been running on fumes for the past week, I needed a new activity to get through the last week without a book to take up the majority of the class. I luckily made an activity that went over so well I used it in basically every class.

I started the class by telling the students, if they did well enough and had a perfect paper, they would win as much as they would for winning a small contest at our school. The challenge of the paper was that the students had to write down ten words relating to a topic without looking up anything in a book, on their phone, or in a dictionary.

I made a form with eight columns with ten numbered rows in each. At the top of the column, I labeled it with an age appropriate topic from their books. For the easy low level class, students had topics like “Food”, “Things I can do” or “Body parts”. The upper level classes had topics like, “European Countries” “In my Body” or “Objects in Space”.

Everything in the column had to be spelled correctly for the column to count for the reward. They had eight chances to get something, and one or two of the topics were easy enough that anyone should have been able to pick up an easy reward. The challenge came from remembering ten words AND spelling them all correctly. One mistake and the other nine words were wasted.

The students sat down with this task and worked intensely hard for about thirty minutes, which is phenomenal for a worksheet I thought up and made in about ten minutes. The rewards being spread through the class so that they could see that thinking up just one more word was worth the heavy prize distribution I had promised. The best I did was hand out four prizes, and that would be high for an activity I normally do, but I rarely have an activity that lets me sit, in near silence, and just watch the students work. It was a nice change of pace.

There were some hilarious spelling mistakes, some clever answers, and some very explosive sighs when one mistake repeatedly sank their chances to get a reward. I think the thing went over pretty well, and I’d do it again in a few months.