Instead of an introduction
I have a small problem: my brain does not like dealing with written instructions and, really, any instructions whatsoever. I cannot make myself. What that means for my life is that I use devices instead of reading the manuals, I prefer to watch cooking videos rather than reading any recipes (and, indeed, no matter how exciting the food, if the instructions for cooking are longer than four or five lines, I immediately lose interest). In my teaching life, that means never reading any teachers’ books (if I can help it and most of the time I can). If I find an activity that I like, in a resource pack, for example, and I cannot figure out how to use it only from the game itself, well, I just never use it at all.
Or I make up my own rules. That’s exactly what happened with this game.
It actually makes me giggle. I have had this game for about three years (a lovely present from Chee-Way) and it was only this week that I noticed the name of the game. Apparently, it is called Snap. Oh, well.
This morning I was finally inspired enough to google how to play it and I found it easily enough, only to find out that I had never played it the right way. Oh, well.
Actually, I had some suspicious that what we were playing was inspired by another game, that I once heard about but when I bothered to find out, it turned out this morning that I couldn’t have been more wrong. Oh, well.
The Sheep Game (as we know it)
- There are 12 different emotions / feelings / adjectives in the set. We started to play with those that the kids knew already and, then, we kept adding one or two with every next game. At this point, they know all of the adjectives and we play with the whole set.
- There are 4 cards of each adjective but in any real game, we use only two of each. One is displayed on the floor in the middle of the circle. The other one we deal among the teams. Usually each team ends up with four cards.
- The students keep their cards secret from the other teams.
- We sit in a circle, students ask the questions to the team sitting on their left or on their right but the questions are always travelling in one direction.
- The main question is ‘Are you happy / sad / angry?’
- If the team have this one particular card, they have to answer ‘Yes, I am’ or ‘Yes, we are’ and give away the card.
- If the team don’t have this particular card, they have to say ‘No, I am not’ or ‘No, we are not’ and then it is their turn to ask the team on their left / right.
- The game can be played for a certain number of rounds or until one of the teams loses all their cards. Then the winner is announced and that is the team has the biggest number of the initial set left.
- It is a great game to practise the key vocabulary, in a sentence and although the students play in teams, they can win the game only when they pay attention throughout the entire game, listening to all the teams and keeping track of all the cards (or words) that were mentioned and lost, too.
Variations
- Blue, please – one of the first games that I normally play with my primary students, in the first weeks of the course, as soon as we feel comfortable with the basic colours or numbers, we play with flashcards that we usually hide inside of the book, to make sure that the cards remain a secret. As soon as the kids progress, we replace the simple ‘please’ with a full question ‘Can I have blue, please?‘ and we play it this way with any set of vocabulary
- Do you like… – another variation of the game that we play with the beginner primary students, we normally switch into that version when we start the topic of food and drink. If the students / teams have this particular flashcard in their set, they have to answer ‘Yes, I do‘ and they have to give the card away. If not, they answer ‘No, I don’t‘ and they continue playing.
- What’s the matter with your…– a version that we played with my teens while working on the health / medical vocabulary which turned this game into a mini dialogue with different yes and no answers (yes = I need to have it / them checked, no = nothing I am fine) or Excuse me, where is the check-in gate? while we were working on the travelling / airport vocabulary (yes = it is next to…, no = sorry, I don’t know).
- Any other set: the vocabulary set + the structure that would be used with this set
- Whole class vs groups of three? With the younger kids we normally play whole class, in small pairs because it helps them learn the rules of the game much faster and because the game is easy to set up and you need no other materials apart from the set of flashcards normally used in class. With the older students, I use words on small cards and we normally play it with the whole class only in the beginning, later on they play in groups of three.
- And the winner is… Well, there are at least two options here. For a very long time we played it in such a way that the winner was the team who had the biggest number of cards left at the end. Until my kids suggested that perhaps the winner should be the team who managed to get rid of their cards first and we played it this way, too. On the one hand, it makes the game less competitive and it is not a real shame to be ‘losing’ a card but we have had a situation when a team avoided asking the right question not to help their opponents win…I suppose the game can be played as normal and it can be decided only in the end who the winner is (all the cards lost vs all the cards saved) but we haven’t really tried it in the classroom. Not yet anyway.
- Leftovers. We normally deal out all the cards available but keeping a few cards away and keeping them secret adds up to the challenge. These leftovers are going to be automatically the incorrect questions and the players will have to figure out first which ones these are and secondly, which ones not to ask anymore.
Happy teaching!