Title – The Un(Stable) Tower or

How to Use your English Creatively

By – Nicky Leon

Primary Subject – Language Arts

Grade Level – multiple

Description of the game:

There are 57 parallelepipedic pieces of wood that have to be arranged in three-piece layers. Each participant has to take off a piece carefully in a way that does not demolish the tower. The one who pulls it down first or the team he/she is part of, loses the game.

Notes:

• Besides improving students’ manual abilities, these games also have psychological implications:

  • they develop students’ imagination
  • when played individually they increase the responsibility and trust in one’s own forces
  • when played in teams, they generate a sense of competition with the other groups and of cooperation within the group
  • offering the wooden pieces and paying a compliment may generate positive feelings towards the others

• It may be played with children of different ages.
• Those who lose are supposed to be ‘punished’, but low, amusing punishments are recommended: to tell a poem, a riddle, a joke; to sing a song
• The wooden pieces of the game may be used in at least four ways:
  1. building them vertically, piece by piece;
  2. getting out piece by piece, paying attention not to demolish the tower;
  3. using them individually;
  4. using them in order to construct horizontally.

Possible usages:

GRAMMAR

E.g.:
-

degrees of comparison

(paying compliments to others)

:





‘I give this (wooden piece) to Jim, who’s

• the most courageous boy I’ve ever met.’

• more hard-working than I am.’

VOCABULARY

E.g.:

When you take off a piece, you have to:
• tell the name of an
  
  object in the
  
  
  kitchen
  
  ;

• make a sentence using words related to
  
  buildings
  
  .

  
  

Prepositions
: build a town on the floor where the pieces stand for the buildings. Students make dialogues related to the position of the buildings.

SPEAKING ACTIVITIES

• the teacher starts a story and each student who takes off a piece goes on with the story by adding one more sentence to it.
• at the end of each activity the students may be asked how they felt during it.

WRITING ACTIVITIES

• ‘My/Our Story’- in which each piece is a sentence. The final structure will have to look like a tree, a girl, a flower, etc. (horizontal construction). This activity may be done individually or in a group.
• they may write the story of this tower.

COMPLEX GAMES

1. The wooden pieces are wrapped in a piece of paper that contains a text with indications regarding where another piece is hidden (somewhere in the room). The children are grouped in two rows, representing two teams. The first child in each team is given a wooden piece. The teacher calls: “Ready, steady, go!”. They both start finding the piece using the indications. The moment any of them finds it, he/she gives it to the next member of his/her team. The first team that finishes finding all the pieces first, wins the game.

Variant 1: all the members of the team contribute to the finding of the hidden pieces.

Variant 2: after both teams find all the pieces, they may start building the tower while fulfilling a task: e.g.: to tell the name of an animal starting with letter (the previous player is supposed to tell what letter it should be). The members of the two teams put, in turns, one more piece to the tower. The one that tells the name of an animal respecting the given condition gains one point for his team. The winning team is the one that has most points.

2. The students are divided into 2 teams. Each of the two receives a map (of Great Britain, of U.S.A., of Romania, etc.). This game may be a follower of a Geography class, in which students were taught information about each of the mentioned cities.

   Now, each member is supposed to tell a few things about the city whose name is written on the paper the wooden piece is wrapped in. More than that, he/she has to place it correctly on the map. For each correct piece of information and correct placement, the team receives a certain amount of points. The team with most points wins.

   Variant: the members of the team may help their co-worker if he/she doesn’t know the answer.

E-Mail

Nicky Leon

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