Wanna motivate your students in class? How about using Games?

Have you encountered the following situation? 

Your class started for 10 minutes only, but your students start losing their attention already - they keep yawning, lying on their desk and propping their chin on their hands. Possibly, it is because your class is dull and boring to them. 

To deal with this problem, teaching with the aid of Games is always a good idea. With creative and interactive content, students can learn their knowledge in a relaxed and funny way.  Last week, I have tried to make a game using Wordwall for my language class and it works, so I want to recommend it to you in this post.

Wordwall Home page

Wordwall is a tool that can allow teachers to design games with the aid of 33 interactive templates. Most of the templates are suitable to use in language classes, for example, Wordsearch, Crossword, Labelled Diagram etc. You can choose one of them and start your design.

Templates

After clicking "Create with this template", you can start editing the game by simply entering the title, instruction and words. You can choose whether you want to give clues in the game as well.

Content editing page

Also, you can design the game by choosing the theme that makes it eye-catching. You can customise your game with different options as well, like adjusting the difficulties, the duration and enabling choices in the game etc. according to the level and English proficiency of your students.

Theme and Options

Moreover, there is a Leaderboard function so you can enable it and check the score of your students, thus you can know whether your students have a thorough understanding on what you teach. You can customise how you want the Leaderboard looks like, for example, the number of students shown in the leaderboard, when the information is removed etc.

Leaderboard

This tool is user-friendly and it allows teachers to create the game efficiently without spending much time. It is also friendly for teachers with limited computer literacy as the interface is direct and simple. There is not much technology knowledge required for using this application.

If you are a teacher in primary or junior secondary schools, I recommend this game to you. You can use it for teaching vocabulary if your main focus of the class is on words and phrases. Also, you can use it as a pre-task activity before the class so students' attention will be caught easily, especially in the first 10 minutes as it is suggested to be the most valuable for holding students' attention by previous literature. 

However, it is not really an appropriate application if the focus of your class is on other skills like reading and oral etc., as most of the templates are designed for vocabulary with only a few templates are for teaching sentences, for example, "Unjumble", "Missing Word" etc. If you are in this case, you may need to choose another teaching tools.

Lastly, this is my game which is designed for my language class. The focus of the class is teaching "Months". Enjoy the game and let see if you can find all the words in the puzzle within the time limit.😉

Wordsearch - Months