Teacher Discussion Forums

Today was a low attendance day for my students, because they're doing their big middle-school exams these days. For this reason, I'm downshifting into so-called enrichment activities.

I had made yutnori boards (a Korean game explained at length at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yut). One doesn't need anything for this game board except numbers for each of the 29 places to land. Use a six-sided die to roll, with the number six being a roll again. (Korean use yutnori stcisk instead of dice when moving their pieces around the game board, but are the sticks incredibly noisy on tables!)

Anyway, I printed out a copy of the essay topics list (all 185 of them), made 29 separate compartments each containing five to eight essay topics, then had them plan a verbal respondse for three minutes. (I used a sand timer rather than a stopwatch or digital watch.)

The student gets three minutes to plan a verbal response. During this time the rest of the students play some kind of spelling/vocabulry game as filler. ( iused Boggle.) They have to listen intently and respond to what the person said.

At the end of class, they do a 30-minute inside class essay on one of the essay topics list, as dutifully printed out from the ETS websiote.

It was a good way for them to do TOEFL preparation and in-class writing, at a time when they'd rather not think about tests. I can check for how well they attack a question or topic, and the students can have fun.

A better link to the Yutnori article would be

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yut

Sorry for the confusion if you went to the link I mentioned in the earlier post.

By the way, this Wikipedia article can take you to links to other boards from around the world. Conceivably, if you want some other kind of traditional board game to use with your students -- especially one that many of your students would already be familiar with -- you could use one of these. Or perhaps the more exotic for your students, the better.

Here's the link to the index to 14 similar games:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:C ... rcle_games

The article on pachisi looks interesting, and includes a good game board:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachisi

If you speak French, you may want to read about this cool-looking game, which looks like a French improvement on Ludo and features a stylish game board:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeu_des_petits_chevaux

You may also want to check out this website for more data than necessary on board games:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/

Don't know if it would be helpful, though.

If you do investigate one of the traditional board games, and you come up with a TOEFL activity based on it, please share it here, OK?