A word or two

My summer vacation has sadly come to an end.  Time always flies when you're relaxing but seems to stand still once you step out the door to go to work.  With the end of our summer vacation comes the stress of having to plan new lessons for the new semester.  My friend, Sandra and I were bouncing ideas off each other for cool ice-breakers and class fillers and she came up with the most brilliant idea.  It's a fusion of scrabble and jenga.  I think this game actually exists but our version is a little different.

For our version of the game I printed out scrabble tiles and glues them to the jenga blocks.  It's a lot of work but seeing the excitement in the kids eyes when you say "we're playing jenga" makes it all worth it.

An afternoon of cutting and pasting

High level of concentration

Sample word

I played this game during my summer classes.  I split the class into teams and got a member from each team to come up and make a three letter word by strategically moving jenga blocks.  Teams were then awarded points which are calculated by adding the the points written on the scrabble tiles.  I didn't tell my students how the scoring worked but when they figured it out, it challenged them to make better words.  We had a lot of fun with it, the wobbly desk in my classroom added to the intensity.  

I hope you and your students can have as much fun.

Happy teaching!