Task 5

Examine, and then try the following games and activities[1] with the children. When you have had your own experience put down which of them were useful and effective and which ones were not working in your class.

Aeroplane competition

First, have your learners make some paper airplanes. Stand the children in a line and let them test fly their planes. For the competition, assign different classroom objects points (e.g. table 5 points, door 10 points, and trash can 20 points). Ask a child a question and if she/he answers correctly then she/he can throw and try to hit one of the target objects to win points.

Shirt game

Divide the children into two teams and give a man's shirt to each team.  Be sure each shirt has the same amount of buttons down the front.  At the signal, the first person on each team puts on the shirt and buttons all of the buttons down the front.  The one who is buttoned-up first gets to answer the question you ask.  Of course a question equals points.  If the answer is incorrect, the person from the other team gets a chance to answer.

Classroom Races

Races are a fun way to teach a lot of different action verbs and adjectives/adverbs. Line the students up and tell them the action they have to do during the race and then shout go. Actions include: giant strides, little steps, run backwards, skip, jump, hop, and crawl like a crab/baby, hop like a rabbit/frog, fly like a bird, walk quickly/slowly and so on.

Mixed Bag

This is a good 5 minute review activity that you can do with any age group.  Take a bag and put in various objects that the class have studies in the past (plastic food, toys, stationary, model cars, etc.).  Pull out each object, elicit it and then throw it somewhere in the room.  When all the objects have been thrown out teacher shouts out the word for one of the objects and the students race to collect it and put it back in the bag.  If you do this activity on a regular basis put a new object or two in the bag each time.

"We also often discuss the desire for games to be art-for them to be puzzles with more than one right answer, puzzles that lend themselves to interpretation... both [art and game design] entail posing questions - tough ones even, ethical ones, even. And games will never be mature as long as the designers create them with complete answers to their own puzzles in mind."[2]
 

Therefore to the question of how to integrate learning and game play you can take these issues into consideration.

• Work out how to give students points for accomplishing certain goals in a lesson plan
• Decide on rewards for the victors
• Create game pieces
• Test your game before you run it