The day before Christmas Break this year I played Scrabble with all of my students. Last trimester I needed a buffer day between two units and I ended up teaching them how to play Scrabble. What I thought would be a super easy and fun day in my classroom turned into a day where I literally worked up a sweat trying to help all of them play. Having 6 different games happening at once was a little crazier than I planned.
What I learned was that my students have very little experience playing board games. This shocked me because I grew up loving (and still do) board games. Every holiday I would force my family to play everything from cribbage to mouse trap.
My hopes and dreams for this activity was for it to get better than the first time we played. We talk a lot about growth mindset and I told them prior to starting to play that we are just trying to be better Scrabble players, not expert Scrabble players. In order to assist my students, I shared a scrabble dictionary on their iPads that they could use to check if a word was a word while they were waiting for their turns. This led to some really awesome conversations about words and what they meant (it made my nerd heart very happy).
I hope to someday be able to play Scrabble with my students without everyone googling words on their iPads. But I think that will take more practice.
This is fascinating to me! Something that seems such a normal and fond memory of ours is completely foreign to many of our students! I think you should keep playing it with them for sure. Think about the SEL skills that they learn playing a game such as Scrabble with other peers their age!
ReplyDeleteSO glad you included a picture - like you I love board games!! I appreciate how you integrated some learning or new words with a Scrabble dictionary along with the game, and I also agree that a good goal is to be able to have them play without the aid of Google :) This should be possible in middle school.
ReplyDeleteI LOVE BOARD GAMES! I always think it's so different when my students mention how they don't know how to play a classic board game. I take a couple times during the year to play Yahtzee and find it wild how little amount of students know how to play. Such a fun idea for the English classroom!
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