Vinco!

    Vinco is a great little game created by Linda Kordas.  It's a short one - only 10 minutes to play.  It can be used with any level but it will be more helpful for the beginning student.  It's like Bingo except simpler and shorter.  Vinco can be used with any Latin word list. It works well with a new list, maybe one that you have introduced at the beginning of a new unit. Students need not know these new words well for this game to work. The goal of the game is to acquaint students with the new words.

   The students need to have a vocabulary list of 15-20 in front of them.  Ask them to take out a scrap piece of paper and write 5-7 words (your choice here) from the list on the paper.  They write just the Latin  (without the English meaning) .   For example,  here is a Vinco list that might be generated from Ecce Romani, Chapter 10 (Raeda in fossa cadit.)

pes
erat
praeclarus
identidem
iter

 Ask them to close their word lists and then call out the English meaning of the words from the list.  Ask the students to check off the words that they have on their list.  If they have all the words on the list, they should yell out, "Vinco!"  Once someone has yelled out Vinco,  we stop and the person reads off their list to make sure that those words were actually called.  If there were no errors,  then that person is the Vinco winner.  The whole process takes about ten minutes.  

Tips to Make this Game Work:

• This game really works well with a small prize.  I hand out sparkly pencils, rubber snakes - whatever I can find from the dollar store and the students love it.  I think the idea of the prize is more important than the prize itself.
• Declare the first person who yelled out Vinco to be the winner - NOT everyone who has Vinco.  Make this clear in the beginning as well.  Otherwise,  there will be too many winners at once.
• The students are going to want to play another round since many of them "almost won!" If you have time,  do it again.  It gets everyone studying the word list and finding 5 words they can remember right off the bat.  How can that be a bad thing?