A Board Game to Enhance Your Students' Classroom Experience

As a program coordinator, I have the privilege of observing fellow teachers in action. I learn something new every time I observe one.

Recently, I was in a level 4 classroom and saw Trevyan showcase an activity that incorporates fun to increase participation, sustain students' interest, strengthen group interaction, and expose students to more of the targeted grammatical structure. The fun activity was a teacher-prepared, superlatives board game. Trevyan brought in paper game boards inserted into plastic protective sheets along with Ziploc bags, each containing several multicolor chips and a die in them. She put students into groups and gave each group a set of the playing material. The rule was very easy to follow, and soon the whole class roared with excitement.

So impressed with that, I quickly searched the Internet for an editable board game template, the next chance I got. I wanted to enhance teaching practices through board games. Fortunately, I was able to find and download a free "monkey and croc" Word file and produce my own superlatives board game in practically no time. Then, I was also able to duplicate the success of my same-level colleague.

Now, I am thinking this fun and instructive tool can be used to practice other topics that we discussed regularly. For example, we can type in general statements and the players must generate specific details to support the generalizations. It has been a struggle to get some of our ESL students to figure out levels of specificity in academic reading and writing.

By the way, in case you are wondering, the web site that I went to to download  the free editable game board is http://eslgamesworld.com/members/games/templates/index.html.