Fun Review: Bombs and Jeopardy

Teresa Bestwick has a nice post up on a fun way to review with students, The Bomb Game. Looks like a really good tool.

It also reminded me that KZBlog had also put up some Jeopardy games a while back, which I have been using. I asked if I could host them on my site and the KZBlogger very kindly agreed. Obviously you can do Jeopardy low-tech without any materials besides a board and a marker. But having a hi-tech version is more fun for the kids and can make them pay more attention. The advantages of using a game like Jeopardy or the Bomb game are obviously that they are a lot of fun and kids often remember things they learned in a competitive situation. So here are two versions for downloading:

• Jeopardy in HTML
• Jeopardy in Power Point

Both have questions related to a unit review of the Straightforward textbook, so you’ll have to change the questions and answers. Both also come with a 30 second clip of the Jeopardy theme song.

For those unfamiliar with Jeopardy, it’s a popular game show in the US. There are many international versions so it’s worth taking a minute to find out what it’s called in your country so students will get how to play quickly. In Russia, it’s called Cboya Igra for example. The gameboard (which you can just write on the whiteboard, or put on a giant piece of paper if you don’t want to download the versions above) looks like this:

Each column represents a category of questions and each box is a question. The numbers are how many points the player or team gets for answering the question right. Therefore the 100 point questions should be easy and the 500 point questions should be more difficult or complicated. You can obviously have as many categories and questions as you like. I usually do 5 categories and 5 questions and that takes up 1 hour of class time including explaining the game.

Make sure you write the questions in advance. For a low tech version, write the questions on the board, then paste pieces of paper with the points written on them, over the questions.

To play, first you divide the class into teams (3 or 4 is optimal).

Each team in turn chooses a question by calling out the category and point value (Present Simple 100).You then read the appropriate question.

In real Jeopardy, who ever answers the question first gets the points. If they get it wrong, then another team can try. To avoid complete chaos in the classroom, I usually set a pecking order. The team that picked the question gets first try. If they can’t answer or answer incorrectly, then it moves to the next team in a set order (by alphabet, left to right, right to left, whoever has the fewest points). I also set a rule that the whole team has to agree before they answer–this prevents one student from taking control and it also avoids arguments later. You may also want to set a time limit for answering.

The team that gets the question right, gets the appropriate number of points. In real Jeopardy, the team that answers correctly then picks the next question. In classroom Jeopardy, I usually let the next team pick the next question. Again this avoids one team dominating the whole game or one team deciding to zone out.

Keep going until you’ve cleared the board.

You can also play final Jeopardy at the end. Final Jeopardy works like this:
Prepare a final question, which should be quite difficult or possibly a fun question. I like asking more thematic questions or some detail from a class reading or listening.
Each team should place a wager from their total points. So if a team has 1000 points at the end, they can wager up to 1000 points that they will get the final question right.
Once all the teams have placed their wager, ask the question. Each time must WRITE DOWN their answer.
When all the teams have written down their answer, ask them to show their answers. If a team gets the question right, they get as many points as they wagered. If they get it wrong, they lose that many points.
Now reveal the right answer. Declare a winner by number of points and if you like give them a prize like chocolates or stickers.

Kids love these games and you’ll get a lot of requests to do it every single class!