🧶 The String Game!
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This is a great review game. It works equally well to motivate shy students to speak and also to keep talkative students ( you know who you are! ) on track 🙂
For the string I use brightly coloured shoe laces. I have four that are just one lace long, 3 that are 2 strings tied together, one that is 3 laces long and one that is 4 laces long. That way its easy to compare who has the longest string!
1. A student comes to you and takes a piece of string from your hand. The tension is crazy, will they get a short one? Or a crazy long one?
2. When you say “Go!” this student winds the string around their finger. But they can only wind the string when they are talking English!
3. This can either be vocab words from the board, introducing themselves or talking on a topic you give them ( e.g. something easy like “fruits” more tricky like “evolution of steam power”) depending on what you need to practice.
4. When they are not talking they can’t wind the string. They can only wind when they are speaking English!! (This is what makes it fun!)
5. When they get to the end their team gets a point.
6. Repeat from step 1.
For beginner kids it’s fine for them to just say any words they know. But for higher levels you should assign a topic they have to talk about, e.g. self introduction, your favourite animals or the current economic situation in South America. And for more talkative students give them a spoken task that they have to finish in the time it takes to wind the string. If they have a short piece that is quite a challenge!
Enjoy!
Be genki,
Richard
P.S. Watch out for the very nervous kids who start to wind a little too tightly! Do some Genki breathing with them to relax and try again 😀
