So many times teachers struggle with how to get more repetition in with the input they are giving students. Many teachers get stuck saying, “I gave the information, I told the story, now what?” After giving a lot of input or telling a story, I like to play a game. The games played can focus on the vocabulary but if possible, I want to use the language more conversationally or at least using complete sentences.
I learned a version of Tic Tac Bingo from this blog post.
Giving students exposure to the information three, four, or even five times will help them build better proficiency by creating images in their mind’s eye. What better way to do this than by gamifying what you are teaching.
Why play Tic Tac Bingo?
This game works great for a review or after a lecture/story/new content has been taught. Tic Tac Bingo checks a lot of boxes for the goals in a language classroom.
- It gives repetion
- It checks comprhension
- It gives exposure to grammar structure and new terms
- It uses question and answer format mimicking a conversation
- It uses narration
How to set up Tic Tac Bingo
Set up is easy and very low prep for Tic Tac Bingo. The teacher will write 20 questions about the input. Then the teacher will put the answers to those 20 questions, in random order, in a table for students to see.
Students will draw a tic tac toe board using 9 squares. The teacher will project the answer table to the students. Students will choose which answers they want on their board and write them into their squares.
The teacher will ask a question. If the student has the answer on their board, they raise their hand. The student will give the answer. If they are correct, clap. If they are wrong say no, explain where their answer is from in the story, and ask if another student has the answer. Continue until you have the correct response. Show the answers and point to the correct response on the projected table to ensure all students understand. Play until you have asked all of the questions. If you are short on time, play until you have a winner.
How to continue the learning
Instead of just asking and answering questions, discuss the answer in more depth. Turn the game into a conversation by asking students their opinions or making a connection to the student or the student to the content. For example, if you are learning about occupations and you ask about the job the character has, you can ask the student what do they want to be in the future. Or you can ask if they think that profession is a good job and why.
Having more than one winner
There are a number of ways to award a winner in this game.
- First person with tick tac toe wins
- Winners for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places
- Every student who gets a tic tac toe gets a name put into a drawing
I can’t wait to see how you use this in your classroom.
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