This year we went all the way until December 23rd before getting out of school for Christmas break. I planned to have my classes play a game that was fun, but that could also be loosely tied to my subject matter: catchphrase. For anyone who hasn’t played, it’s an electronic disc (some kids thought I had an old disc-man) that shows a word that players have to get their team to guess by giving clues. Once the player gets their team to guess the word, they pass the disc to the next person. All players are in a circle standing every other player on a team. The disc is beeping faster and faster and a point is given to the opposite team of who it stops on (sort of like hot potato).

I had one of my classes play this game last year when we were discussing communication skills. I had them play for half the period, and then we stopped to debrief. I asked them which strategy seemed to work better – raising your voice and re-stating the same clues over again when your team didn’t guess correctly, often expressing disbelief that they couldn’t guess it yet, or calmly finding different ways to describe the word. After agreeing the second method would be more effective, we continued to play for the rest of the period to practice our communication skills.

So anyways, I had my classes play this game on the last day before Christmas break, and the result varied quite a bit. I had some students (probably the more extroverted ones) get really into it and show their competitive side. They were having a blast! Then I had some who flat out didn’t want to play from the beginning. A few of these had tests in other classes later in the day so I allowed them to study. (Who gives a test on the LAST day before Christmas?!). Some played but skipped so many words until they found one they deemed easy enough to give clues for (which in my eyes is cheating). And others decided that, once their team guessed words that were close, it was close enough, and passed the disc on (also cheating in my eyes). As you can tell, I am not a fan of cheaters. My last class of the day is my largest, and they’re 9th graders. It got to the point where the person next to the student giving clues would just yell out the word, defeating the point of the game. They were just too hyper and they are always my most difficult class to control.

I jumped in and played with a few of the classes, depending on the numbers (you need an even number to play). The nice thing about a day like this is that, since I wasn’t planning on having a formal lesson covering course content, I got to chat with some of the students that I hadn’t gotten to much this year yet. It’s always nice to find out more about your students outside of class, especially when you discover you have things in common. As much as I enjoy that, though, I was definitely looking forward to Christmas break and will enjoy the time away from the classroom!