Jan 2015 Meeting: Chuck Waterman and Using Activities based on Published Board Games in the EFL classroom

Pictures and information from PIGATE's 1st meeting of 2015 are below!!

Despite end of the term tests and other obligations, we welcomed 20 participants to the January meeting of PIGATE, again held at the English Lounge.

Ai Sakaida, a fourth year student in the Foreign Language Department at Kumamoto Gakuen, was the chief for the session and opened the session by introducing Chuck.

Chuck teaches at KGU and at Luther and his background before coming to ESL was drama.

Chuck's game stash

Vocabulary Review and Practice

 The first game was based on a game called Reverse Charades (Porter, S. and Porter, B. (2010) Phoenix, AZ: Eagle-Gryphon Games) as a vocabulary introduction activity. It is basically charades, but the group is the actors, and a single person is the guesser. The exercise got everyone moving and in the analysis after the game, we discussed using it to regularly introduce vocabulary, and asking the teacher to be the guesser.

Some post game suggestions were to do sets of vocabulary (occupations, nouns, adjectives, phrases) and use this to introduce vocabulary at the beginning of each lesson.


Connectors

Yes, that's Takaki sensei!

The second activity was one where the teacher and the groups get a starting phrase, and they have to Wise and Otherwise (wiseandotherwise.com) The idea is that the groups are trying to come up with a phrase to complete the sentence that people will confuse with what the teacher produces. The original game uses proverbs and Chuck has adopted it for writing prompts.

The game started out with a picture of Takaki sensei (on the right) from about 20 years ago and a sentence that began
"Everyday after Takaki sensei finishes working,  _________"

After that, we did the PIGATE practice of きてみらん、してみらん, where we introduce ourselves to each other, which was followed by a short break

 After the break, we played a variation of an out of print game called Moods (Hasbro/Parker). The goal is to repeat phrases using different emotions. If the other players guess the correct emotion, both the actor and the guesser get a point. Guessers can 'bet', and get more points when they are sure of the emotion.

The session closed with Takaki sensei's summary

Yesterday

and today!

The meeting was followed by the Shinnenkai, which gets a post of its own!!