"50x15" with year 6 05.02.13

During the last sessions I've been teaching the past of the verb to be in year 6. On the first lesson I taught the grammar structures: affirmative (I was, I were...), negative (I wasn't, I weren't...) and interrogative (were you...?). Then, we practised this grammar thanks to some exercises from the book. On Tuesday, I decided to prepare a very famous a motivating game to keep learning and to consolidate the grammar in a different and funny way: 50x15. This game consist in asking a question and offer four different answers, then the participants must choose the correct option. In this case, I wrote an incomplete sentence and children had to select the word that matched in the gap. Here you have an example:

To play the game I divided the class into four groups formed by students with different English level. Then I gave very clear instructions: all the groups had to answer all the questions and they should write the correct option on a sheet of paper. After writing their answers on the paper, I took a look around to check them and I showed the appropriate option. The teams that guessed right won a point.

I saw the kids enjoying the game and very motivated to guess the correct answer. They were very concentrated and although some of them cheated and looked into the book to answer correctly, they did a good job. I also think that this game was very useful to see the verbs in real sentences and kids had to understand the whole meaning of the question to say the word so it wasn't just a mechanical exercise.

I think that I controlled the situation when kids were playing and I tried to manage the group in the best way. When kids were so noisy I stopped the game and until children didn't realised they were behaving badly and then they paid attention again, I didn't continue playing. I also have to say that I explained the most difficult sentences. For example, there was a question that nobody got right so I stopped the game for a while and I told why it was the correct option.