January 21, 2011

Kids love games - Part 1: Conversation Cards

How many times have you played Human Bingo on the first day of class? I think Human Bingo is a quick and simple way to get the ball rolling as it allows students to get to know each other and lets them move around to get rid of some of the nervousness.

Since Human Bingo is only designed to be a starter, I was looking for an activity where students can have extended conversations and learn about their classmates in greater depth. I wanted to do something fun, yet well-structured at the same time while giving plenty opportunity for the students to talk and listen to each other.

I thought of typing a list of questions, print them on small index cards, and randomly assigned the cards to the students, but I have done that too often by now. So using the same idea, I decided to use a deck of cards as a tool!

I call it: Conversation cards
  • Depending on the grade level of the students and time allotment, make a list of questions consisting of min. of 13 questions (# of cards in a suit) for your students to ask each other.
  • Assign each question to the cards in the deck (see example of questions). You could make as little as 13 questions and as many as 52 questions. 
  • Shuffle the cards and distribute them to the groups of students (adjust the size of the group based on your class size; to me the smaller the better as it allows more in-depth conversations that follow the Q&A's sessions).
  • Give each group the list of questions the correspond to the cards.
  • Extended activity: ask the students to share their findings about their peers
  • A follow-up activity: ask the students to write appropriate questions that they'd like to ask their peers and include that in the list. 

I used this game with a group of adult ESL learners (intermediate level) and they had a lot of fun with this conversation game. I made many 'what if' questions and 'describe a scenario' type of questions. I surprised when I heard that they asked many follow up questions and they were clearly engaged in very interesting and stimulating conversations.

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