The cupboard - a new game!

I am writing this post because I promised world fame to two of my Year 5 pupils.

 

If you read my blog regularly you know about the 10-minute teachers: they are volunteer pupils (kind of...) who have to teach a mini lesson every week on a topic they like most. They revise vocabulary with the class, play a game with them and make them sing a song. During this time I sit  with the other pupils and participate. I introduced this activity in two groups last year, and it turned out to be a success, a very anticipated part of the Spanish lesson.  But the approach was different in Year 5 and Year 6, and not because I set the rules differently...while in Year 6 the teachers revised previously learnt topics (animals, transport, family...etc.), in Year 5 the pupils insisted on creating new topics, like computers, wild animals, sweets...etc. They were very excited about finding words in the class dictionaries and inventing new games! I even had a pupil who included his mum in this activity, they made the list of words together, which made me so happy:-)

 

So here comes the new game, it is called THE CUPBOARD!! (There is a cupboard/small room in every room where I teach.)

Here are the rules:

1, two volunteers go in and they close the door (one would be enough but they insist somebody has to open/close the door:-),

2, while the class is quiet, the person inside says a sentence in Spanish including the new vocabulary (I insist on sentences, not just words),

3, the class has to guess what the sentence is,

4, the person who guesses the sentence can go in THE CUPBOARD, with a pupil of his/her choice.

 

The class is so quiet during this activity you could hear a pin drop and they all concentrate on the sentence. Because it is very hard to hear the sentence clearly from the classroom, they come up with rhyming words, similar words, the right words but without plural, etc... It really makes them think!

 

By the end of the school year, it became the most popular game leaving all time favourites like "the secret signal" and the "mystery voice" well behind.

 

 

If you have a cupboard/small room inside your classroom, try it! And don't forget to credit it to the Year 5 pupils in Burscough Village Primary School:-)

 

 

In my house this game is called "the wardrobe", the big favourite for "hide and seek".