Challenges are fun and can be a valuable teaching method. Clara Prado gives her top tips for teaching a challenge.
It is not news that games play an important part in English teaching. We use them as icebreakers, in role-playing, and to practice vocabulary and grammar among other things. Using games in the classroom can keep students interested, minimize the differences in language levels and increase the interaction between students and the teacher. We can also use games to make the class more fun and take out some of the pressure of a school environment.
Challenges and Games
So why is a challenge different from a game? Well, it’s not. A challenge is a game.
One of the differences between them is that a puzzle game has only one solution so the participant has to find one answers. Therefore it’s limiting. Also, a puzzle is not about who wins or loses, but about a specific goal.
A puzzle is a type of game that requires participants to use their imagination or language skills in order to solve a riddle, a charade or just an enigma, Sherlock Holmes’s style. Moreover, to solve the mystery, students have to work fast – or at least faster than the others – and use every tool available to decipher the challenge proposed by the teacher.
Using challenges in the classroom
When I think of a challenge, I normally give all my students an opportunity to solve it, from the youngest to adults. I set a period, like a week or a month, and I normally display everyone’s answer. Because people can see what the others are thinking, they can workout other possibilities, especially when they see what they had originally thought already up on the board. I generally give a symbolic prize, like a chocolate or candy, but I can tell from experience that students are more interested in solving the challenge, than in the prize itself.
For ideas, I usually look at puzzling situations in my own life. To make sure that the challenge I propose is at the correct level for all my students, I first take a look at the EGP (English Grammar Profile) to help me develop something doable and possible for each level. Puzzles should be neither too easy nor too hard. A good puzzle will make you think a little harder and use your imagination.
Ideas for challenges
Here are some types I have used before:
1. Real life challenge
The first challenge I ever gave my students came from an online dating site! My friend was chatting with a man from Scotland and he wrote her a message that was hard to decipher, as it had some mistakes, slangs and Internet lingo like “LOL” or “OMG”. I called it “real life challenge”. In real life, people not always have a perfect English and sometimes you will need to use your imagination to understand them!
2. Guessing challenge
One day I was leaving my apartment and I notice that my neighbor had a basket outside her door. Days went by and the basket was still there and I had no idea why. One day, I finally saw. It was for her cat to sleep in! I would never have guessed it! So I took a picture of the basket and printed with the question “Why is this basket here, what do you think?”. I was teaching modal verbs, so it was perfect. I told the students they couldn’t repeat the sentences so I got a lot of great responses. One student got it right.
3. Song challenge
This is a fun challenge! All I do is I take a small part of a song, normally a popular one, and I give students a week to tell me the name of the song and the artist who sings it. This forces students to pay attention to the lyrics of songs the listen to all the time. Last time I wrote on the board “There is no innocent one in this game for two”.
4. Speaking challenge
I found this one on the Internet. I saw a post about a poem and it said, “If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.” I got a part of the poem and the students had to go home, practice and then read it out loud to the class. This was a great opportunity to practice pronunciation obviously, but it was also very good to show students that they can use tools online to study pronunciation.
How about you? Have you ever used done a challenge with your students? Can you share with us?