If you’re tired of the simple flip card review strategy, or the boring vocabulary word write ups, try some of these vocabulary word games with your students.
One of the most powerful vocabulary word games is to challenge your students to write their own stories, poems, or plays using a large chunk of their vocabulary words. They can work alone, or in groups, however, one of the advantage of groups is that you can also have them perform their works in front of the classes. You could spend almost an entire day doing this if you correctly plan for the day, and students really enjoy getting to write and perform their own plays, skits, and poems.
Another idea for a review game is to allow your students to create their own fill in the blank quizzes for others. If you have ten or twelve vocabulary review words for the section, have them write a sentence for each, and then take them to the computer lab to type them up. When they’re done, make multiple copies of each, and hand them out to others. This is another activity which works best for groups, since that ascertains that the quizzes will actually work out correctly with the right words in the right kinds of sentences. Individual students who struggle might not be able to correctly formulate the sentences properly. You can give the quizzes to different groups, or to individual students, which helps you figure out who knows their stuff, and who doesn’t.
My final game for vocabulary review is to have students pair up and to give each group a thesaurus. If you don’t have enough, don’t forget about doing this in the computer lab where you can use an online thesaurus. Have one student look up a word using the resource, and read off one of the synonyms. At this point, their partner can either attempt to guess the word, or pass, and then another word is read off. If the student is able to guess after one word, they get one point, after two words, they get two points, and so forth. The winning student is the one with the lowest score after the end of each round. Students should switch roles often, and play with multiple different partners.
In all of these vocabulary word games, I try to make sure that the students are doing almost all of the work, and in either case, they’re thinking about the vocabulary words in a different frame of mind: as an author in the first, and a teacher in the second and third. This really helps them get excited about the activities, and makes it easier for you to get them to work hard on their assignments. When you can do this, you’ll have no trouble making your students remember and utilize these vocabulary words in new ways.