My idea was to play who wants to be a millionare with questions on figurative language. I had no acess to the internet so I could not use a pre made template and so I just made my own slightly less impressive one than some I have since found on the net. Mine is still perfectly serviceable though and it worked well.
To make it easier to play in the class setting I seperated the students into two teams and they raced to get to 1,000,000.
First I explained the rules of the game such as the point system.
The point system was the same as in the game show:
500,000
250,000
125,000
64,000
32,000-Milestone question
16,000
8,000
4,000
2,000
1,000-Milestone question
500
300
200
100
In the real game if you get a question wrong before you reach a milestone question you go back to 0 or whatever your last milestone question amount was. For this game my rule was that if you are for example on 8,000 you will go back to 4,000 to make the game a bit fairer and quicker to get through.
While I played the game with the students my mentor teacher took the rest of the class to the back of the room to do another activity.
The first group on Wednesday were really loud and I had to remind them constantly to be quiet. They knew that I could not enforce what I was saying. I could recognise where I had to improve and my mentor teacher told me some ideas on classroom management. They were engaged though and were having fun with the lesson so I could understand why they were being so noisy.
On Friday it went a lot better. I made a lot of impovements from the first time giving this lesson. One thing I changed was having the students sit on chairs rather than on the floor as that was one of the things that the students in the first lesson asked me if they could do. At the start of the lesson I explained my expectations clearly and made sure that they understanded what was expected of them ie. that they had to be quiet because there were other students in the grade who were also trying to learn, that when they were answering their questions they had to discuss the answer with the group and everyone had to agree on the answer, that they were not aloud to shout out when they gave their answer, they could put their hands up or on their head, that they had to wait for me to read out the question before answering. All of these things helped to make the lesson more successful.
One of the students thought to make a toilet flushing noise to signal that they had their answer on the first question. I explained that she couldn't do that all the time because it was unessesary noise and disruptive to the class. I kept an even tone, not raising my voice but expressing that I was dissapointed. It worked and there was no other problems. Occasionaly they would cheer when they got an answer correct (this may have happened twice) and I would say that it was good that they had gotten it correct and they were excited and reminded them to be quiet. They did so straight away.
All in all I was really pleased how the lessons went. The second lesson definately went better than the first. I learnt a lot and recognised areas where I need to improve. My mentor teacher kept a copy of the powerpoint so that he could use it next week with the rest of the class.
I have uploaded the powerpoint that I made here. You may download it and use it in your classroom. I do not mind even if you edit it and change it. Please if you do use it can you let me know. You can even leave comments on how the students liked playing the game or if you have done something similar in the class you can leave a message about it here. I would like to read any comment that you have.
who_wants_to_be_a_millionaire_-figurative_language.pptx |