Sally Gill explains a game devised by Helen McGrath .
Alphaladder and other enjoyable activities for teaching social skills to students are presented in Helen McGrath’s book, Dirty Tricks.

Here is a wonderful activity to really get your kids thinking about words and their structure. If you thought some children would never understand the function of nouns, verbs or conjunctions, you’re in for a pleasant surprise!

READ ON!!!

What to do

The teacher selects a mystery word. Children work in teams of five with assigned roles of questioner, runner, recorder, social skills scribe and leader.

Each team prepares twenty questions which must only be about the structure of the word, not the meaning (for example, grammatical function, syllables, blends, double letter, plural…) In the first round ten minutes are allowed for this. In subsequent rounds, only two minutes are allowed as students fine-tune ‘good strategies’ and questions. Answers can only be yes or no.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One team is the performing team, which calls out their questions and their answer if they work it out before the twentieth question. There is a time limit of six minutes, but two, 90-second time-out sessions are allowed to rethink a strategy.

The remaining teams are shadowing teams, who try to guess the mystery word before the performing team — silently. When they guess the word they write it down and run out to the teacher. It must be written down with the number of the last question asked. The game continues, as they may be incorrect.

There is a scoring system of two points for every question they don’t have to use and a bonus if the shadowing team guesses before the performers.

Benefits

Listening - as the game is fast and focused. Shadowing teams must record the responses and keep up with the performing team trying to outsmart them and guess correctly.

Spelling — the word must be spelt correctly. The structure is closely analysed for things like silent letters, role of vowels (a major discussion point in one time-out session was that ‘y’ can be a vowel), suffixes and prefixes, tense and much more.

Vocabulary reinforcement — as the terms we use in the classroom to describe our writing are reinforced

And….

It’s great fun!!