In my 19 years of teaching Core French I have been asked, a lot, “Can we play a game?!” and over the years my views on playing games has morphed. It likely will continue to change as I learn and grow as a teacher; here’s where I currently sit: games are ok in a classroom.
Every class is different and what worked one year of my teaching may not work for another but this year I have invested heavily in games in my language classrooms. Part of this change is that I am noticing more and more than grade 9 students in particular are struggling to learn and retain language skills in general and specifically until grade 10. This is influenced in part by the fact that grade 9 French in the school I teach at is only a term – elective course lasting 11 weeks (as few as 40 class sessions). Games is one way I have been intentional in helping my students get the most out of these 40 class sessions. Here are the common games used in my classroom.
As explained in our podcast, Oui French Teachers (available on Apple and Spotify), I’ve put time and money into games. The most expensive game I made – and honestly the most fun, is Scrabble. Granted I didn’t make up the game, but I did make the physical game used in my class. I printed large squares, I laminated the squares, I bought and stuck on magnets to make them easy to use on the white board, and it managed to draw only some students in as a ‘fun’ learning option.
I don’t like calling worksheets games, but there are some students who just like them and so I make them available.
While not widely used in my classroom, sometimes the students really want to play Kahoot or Blooket. I find this is more a moral booster than an actual review tool.
Stations is a game that encourages collaboration and team work. I find this ties in nicely with the Ways of Working or Classroom Agreements I make with students at the beginning of a semester. In this document we discuss what are values are as language learners, what we need to feel safe in our learning community, and what that would look like in real time. Students then take the understanding of what and inclusive and nurturing learning community looks like and bring that into their group tasks in the stations. Each station has a different task: writing a paragraph using varied vocabulary or verb tenses, identifying when and how a verb tense is used and writing sample sentences, identifying correct and incorrect (and making the corrections) sentences, sorting sentences that are in specific verb tenses. Stations is relatively easy to produce with a bit of time. I currently have two sets of stations and plan to add to them to include language skills for all grade levels I teach (grades 9-12)
Duolingo and Kwiziq are two online learning platforms I give students the option of using. I personally am not a fan of Duolingo, but I do like Kwiziq and use some of their material as pronunciation assignments.
We also play ‘Go Fish’ and counting games with decks of cards. This especially helps with learning numbers, helps students learn the vocabulary used in math and can solidify math computation skills. I bought the 8 packs of cards for my classroom from a dollar store. I have made instruction sheets for the various games the students play. They have been printed, in colour on card stock and laminated for durability.
Finally, the game I jumped in with two feet this year is Dobble, or Spot It. I first encountered this game while in Normandy, France. I was asked to join friends in a game. None of these friends spoke English and I had to learn vocabulary fast, ‘sur le pouce’ as they say. The goal of the game is to find a similar image on your card as is on the face up card.
To help students broaden their vocabulary ‘sur le pouce’ I created legends which have each image and what they are in French. I included an indefinite article for each image and name so as to help students remember the gender of each image. These legends were photocopied in black and white onto card stock and then laminated for durability. Initially I purchased Dobble (the packaging was all in French) and the first Spot It game from Amazon and they were between $12 – $15 dollars. I found other Spot It options on Temu for about $8 a game.