Gaming and Education: Creating a Card Game for Teaching

My students call me a lot of things. Caring, strict, thought-provoking (at least I hope so)....

very rarely do they call me, or my class, fun.

This stems from part of the feedback I received during the circle I talked about in my Decorating my (future) Classroom post. And it’s not new feedback- I’m a pretty serious person, for the most part. When I was in high school, I liked the school part of school, but not really the people part. Whatever the complete opposite of popular is, that was me.

I try to be fun, but that mostly involves me telling terrible dad jokes or making weird voices or sounds (my fake Russian accent is super cheesy). There’s got to be a way to have a fun class when you’re a sarcastic weirdo, right?

I am going to start incorporating games. I’ve had a games Pinterest board for years, but at my last school there was a big push for a focus on test prep and academia, so it’s been a while since I rolled any of them out. I was browsing my Pinterest board and came across Jennifer Findleys blog. She developed a version of Spoons with a deck she created, where the students would create 4 matches by matching the evidence to the main idea. I rolled with this idea by creating cards where the kids could practice their knowledge of literary devices by matching the device to the definition to the example to the associated vocabulary. If you’re interested in using the game, feel free to contact me at sunravelme on discord or here are the playing cards and the instructions/key. All examples are from the books my students are familiar with- Night by Elie Wiesel, Maus by Art Spigelman, “A Midsummer Nights Dream” by Shakespeare, and The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan.

-The kids have a much easier time “justifying” their answers if they have read the story the quote came from- I would recommend switching out the examples for something your kids have read.
-Color code the cards by printing them out in sets of 16 on different colored paper. This helps keep the sets straight so that the kids don’t mix them up accidentally.
-Provide a sentence stem to help the kids justify their answer, and ask them to raise their hand so they can justify with you around. Then you can give them feedback or track how they are doing with their justifications.
-Differentiate for groups by creating a set with easier or more familiar cards, or a couple of the same devices. Or take the rigor up by having groups play with multiple sets.

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