Four Round Review

    This is an excellent game to review vocabulary when times are tough. When students are tired, bored and balking at doing work, this will save your sanity while providing actual instruction.  Like many good ideas,  it wasn't my invention.  It was described to me by an English teacher many years ago.  Thank you Ms. Lilly. 
     To play,  you need a review list of about 50 words.  The list should include just the Latin words without the English meanings.  You also need to break your students up into teams of 3-4 students.  If you have a group of "Latin stars," put them together and give them a more difficult list.  Otherwise, as you will see, those kids "that know everything" will dominate their team and the other students will likely not participate. 
    To begin, break the students into teams.  Instruct the teams to sit together in small clusters facing each other. Give everyone a copy of the list,  and ask students to  look it over. Encourage them to ask each other about words they don't know.  They may write on the word list.  Give everyone a couple of minutes to familiarize themselves with the list and clarify words that no one seems to remember.
     Then explain that there will be 4 rounds to the game and each round will require a  leader and a scorekeeper. These positions will rotate. During the first round,  the leader will simply read off the Latin words while the rest of the team will call out the English meaning. For each word, the team knows, the scorekeeper will given them a point.  During the second round,  the new leader will read off the English meaning and the team will call out the Latin.  The new scorekeeper will keep track of these points.  During the third round,  the leader will attempt to describe the word in English or in Latin without using the English meaning.  This round is similar to the game, "Taboo."  The last round is the pictionary round where the leader draws the word and the team attempts to guess based on the picture.  I usually divide the board into 4-5 segments and give each team a portion of the board.

How To Lead A Round:
Teacher (addressing class broken up into teams): In this round, the leader is going to  (do one of the things explained above) Does every team have a new leader and scorekeeper? Okay, ready - GO.  Teacher then listen in in on the various groups and calls time when one of the groups has guessed most of the words.  Everyone count up your points (wait a few minutes) Team I, how many points did you get? Team 2  Team 3?  Teacher writes the tallies on the board.  Okay, now switch  leaders and scorekeepers.  In the next round,  ... repeat explanation.

Tips to Make This Game Work:

• Give a brief overview of all the rounds before you start.  Teams will want to strategically choose who will lead each round. 
• The "Taboo" round is going to require the most explanation and a brief demonstration of how you can describe a word without using the meaning.
• This entire game takes between 40-45 minutes.  Don't attempt it unless you have the time.  Excitement builds and it just can't be recaptured when it is broken over two periods.