Title – Foreign Language Months/Vocabulary Card Game

By – Matt

Primary Subject – Language Arts

Grade Level – 6-12

Note from LessonPlansPage.com: although this lesson is designed to teach foreign language months, we feel that it could be wonderfully adapted for reviewing English vocabulary words as well. The descriptions could include 1. This word means stingy, 2. The antonym for this word is weaken, 3. This is an adjective with seven letters, 4. This word fills in this quote from Emerson, “They are ___________, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some dream.”

This lesson is designed to:

1. reinforce names of months in the target foreign language

2. teach auxiliary vocabulary

3. give students a chance to practice listening

First, make a set of cards so that each student will have 5 or 6. On the cards, write the names of the months in the target language.

Second, make a separate set of cards that have descriptions of the words in terms of language and meta-language. For example:

1. This month has snow.

2. This month is a word with 8 letters.

3. This month is yellow.

4. This is the 9th month.

Hand the month cards out to your students and then read your description cards one by one. If a student has a month card that matches the description, he says the name of the month. Then the teacher can explain the description and the answer to the students who didn’t understand. This goes on until one student gets rid of all of his or her cards.

During the next class, the teacher may choose to review the auxiliary words, by writing them on the board and once again asking students which months they describe, such as the word “snow”, or “9th” or “letter”.

It is easy to see how this activity can involve cardinal and ordinal numbers, adjectives including colors and weather, etc.

I have been using this plan with Chinese students learning English and I am confident it could be used with American students who are learning any foreign language!

If you have any successes or failures with it, I would love to hear.

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Matt

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