Have Fun Learning English with Board Games

A total of 80 students who are about to enroll at Kuang Ming

came to my class and had fun learning English with two board games. Five teaching assistants from Class 802 did a great job guiding their future junior schoolmates to actively participate in each game, aiming at some very basic listening and speaking skills. Based on the smile and laughter, I would say most of the students responded quite positively to today's activities.

The main idea for this special event is for the school to introduce some merits and programs in order to assure the parents of the right choice they've made. I guess most of the students who signed up for this event will choose to attend Kuang Ming after graduation. Due to the sluggish economy, the birth rate has been steadily declined for so many years. Even public junior high schools have to worry about not only the number of the graduates from nearby elementary schools but how many of them would actually decide to come. As a result, every school would start a promotional campaign to compete with each other for enrolment.   

Thanks to five of my homeroom students' help, the activities went pretty well. They adapted and tweaked the instructions of the board games quickly after the first two rounds. I eventually just had to give the opening and closing speeches. They also experienced a bit what it would be like to be a teacher, so I encouraged them to actively involve in clubs that volunteer to help students from remote areas with camps during summer vacation. On top of that, their feedback so positive that I encouraged some of them to consider becoming a teacher one day.  

A former member of the English Advisory Team and also a good friend of mine, Sherry Chen, specializes in incorporating board games into English teaching. She kindly lent these hand-made card games as well as taught me how to play. With her passion and dedication to arousing students' interest, she has been handcrafting cards with colored cute animated characters and laminated covers. On top of that, workshops with her showcasing how board games are able to effectively motivate English teachers as well as students in terms of vocabulary and sentence patterns.