End of the Year Option 2: The Word-Off

This project is one of the best things I stumbled upon in my years of teaching World Language. One, it gives us something fun to do and a big shared class goal to work towards, and two, it helps me integrate with my vocabulary-list-loving colleagues. There is one important caveat here. The Word Off is NOT a language acquisition activity. But it does make memorizing lists of words a whole lot more fun!

Basically, the Word-Off is like a spelling bee, but instead of spelling, students will translate vocabulary items from a list that they have worked with for a few weeks. Where do you get the vocabulary items? You can either get then from the required vocabulary lists that your department wants you to teach, or from a list that you brainstorm with your students.

Here is an example of a list that my friend Elena brainstormed with her students at Madison High School. They first listed categories of vocabulary words and then gave her lists of words within those categories that they wanted to learn.

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Each week as you lead up to the Word-Off, you will work with a list of 12-18 vocabulary words. First, you will need a Quizziz account, or another online vocabulary application, to play with the terms. I like Quizziz because it has the “class score” feature. By using this feature, you can bypass the need to pre-teach the words. The students will effectively teach themselves the words as they play the Quizziz.

If you are using lists of vocabulary words from a textbook, you might be able to find pre-existing Quizzizes that are already made for you, using those words. If you are using lists of words that your students brainstormed. If the lists of words you are working with are not in Quizziz, you will have to set those up. You might have the students make the Quizzizes themselves one day in class. You will probably want to make a Quizziz yourself before having students do this, to practice, so you know how to lead them through the process.

When you introduce the Word-Off, you will want to tell students about the PRIZES! You can use whatever kinds of prizes you want, but I am pretty into bribing my students with food. The important thing is that there are 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place prizes for each class as well as a Big Mega-Prize for the class with the highestscoring first-place winner. This would be the first-place winner rom all your classes who makes it to the

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highest number of rounds. Basically, this is a reward for the class who studies the words the most, because if the class goes to a very high number of rounds, then that means the competition was fierce and fewer students were eliminated in lower rounds.

Here are the prizes I offer:

First place in the class: Bag of candy plus the opportunity to win the Class Prize (a pizza/donut party) Second place in the class: Small bag of candy Third place in the class: "Some" candy (basically some pieces of candy from a bigger bag) Fourth place in the class: Bragging Rights and Warn Fuzzy Feelings of Accomplishment

I make a big poster and hang it in the hall to generate "buzz" about the upcoming Word-Off.

Each week, leading up to the final Word-Off, we work with the words for the week. We start each little cycle of working with a new set of words on Friday. The best, fastest, easiest way I have found is the online game Quizziz. If you do not have access to technology, you can do a lot of different activities or games to start

working with the words — paper flashcards that you can use to play games, Charades, Pictionary, or any other vocabulary review game that you and your students like. But I like to take the path of least resistance and use Quizziz!

On Fridays, in the weeks leading up to the Word-Off, we use Chromebooks, go to the computer lab, or get kids on their own devices. I have a set of vocabulary words ready for them. These are either required words or words that they brainstormed as a class.

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I do not pre-teach the words; I just tell the class that we will play Quizziz until the class achieves a 75% or 80% (or higher, depending on your students) class average. This is why I like Quizziz, because it displays a class average, so that I can use it as the way for them to learn the words. We simply play the set over and over until we achieve the class goal. Students thus learn the words as they play. As they learn the words, the class average increases round after round. If a student scores very high more than one round in a row, I have them stand behind another student who wants a “coach” and I have the high-scoring student coach them, but no answer for them. This effectively turns them into study partners for other students.

Once we achieve the desired class average, I let them play a Quizziz that they like better than vocabulary, as an incentive. Searching in Quizziz for “top songs 2019” generally returns a set of questions that kids enjoy. You can ask them for suggestions of topics they want to use as a reward. Sometimes we do not achieve the class average, and if not, that is OK, but we just do not get to play the more-enticing set of questions that day.

At the end of class, I give the class a sheet of the vocabulary in L1 (English for me) and L2 (French or Spanish for me) and tell them that they will help their class beat the other classes and get the pizza or donut party if they take some time to quiz themselves or each other outside of class.

Then the next Monday through Thursday, each day at the end of class or for a mid-class brain break, I do a “mini word-off”. I hold the class’s list of words (if I have multiple levels of classes, or if the kids brainstormed the words they want to work with, each class might have different words, but I just use that class’s list) and go down the list, asking for whole-class responses to the words.

On Monday and Tuesday, I give the L2 (French or Spanish for me) and ask them to call out the English. On Wednesday and Thursday, I give them the English and ask them to call out the L2. I tell them that if I get to a term for which the class’s response is hesitant or weak, I will back up to the first term and go back through them all, to give them a “running start” on the term that they were weak on. This encourages participation, as most kids do not like to hear things repeated; they like to make fast progress through lists. Basically, we are doing a flashcard-type review as a class, daily, for four days.

On Friday, we play another round of Quizziz with the next week's set of vocabulary words. I hand out another sheet with that week’s words plus the prior words, and encourage them to study so as to beat the other classes. Then the next week, I work with the new words in class each day at the end of class or for a mid-class brain break. I will periodically mix in previous word lists, to keep them fresh on their minds. After about three or four sets of words, it is good to do a “practice word-off” with all the accumulated words and give a mini-prize to the first, second, and third place winners in the class.

After five or six weeks, the students will have memorized 60 to 90 or more words, and it is tine for the big Word-Off.

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To prepare for the day of the competition, you will need prizes for the first place, second place, and third place winners in each class (I gave a big bag of candy, a small bag of candy, and "some candy" to these kids) and a plan . to bring a class treat to the class whose first-place winner competed to the highest number of rounds in all your classes. I gave the first-place winner the option of a pizza party or a doughnut party for the class the next day. You can give whatever prizes you want, but I am not above motivating the youngsters with sugar and junk food.

Basically, the Word-Off is run like a spelling bee. I put the desks into rows, and then made a seating chart that had the rows on it. When the kids came in on the day of the Word-Off, I wrote their names in their spots. You could assign spots, but I figured what the hey, it's a celebration, and I let them sit wherever. I also had a group of six or eight chairs in the "Winners' Circle" for the last kids remaining in the last rounds to move to, to increase the suspense for all the kids who were already out of the competition.

To keep the "out" kids focused during the final rounds you could hand them a sheet of all the words in English, with blanks beside them, when the final kids are competing, and have a secondary competition with a minor prize like a fancy pencil or a cool sticker or a dip into the "prize bucket", for kids who get the most Spanish words filled in. In order to make it an incentive to listen, I suggest requiring them to write the number of the round in which the words were asked, beside the word, so that they do not just fill in the words they know, but instead actually listen to the competition.

I made a list of the words we had prepared and held them in my hand, in a random order, and began the competition. In once of my classes, I hd a heritage speaker of Spanish (heritage speakers in my school tended to go into the Dual Immersion program, so we did not have a large number of them in the "late entry" (which is to say, elective) Spanish classes. I asked him to hold another list of the words and make sure that his classmates' answers were correct.

If you have a large number of heritage speakers, you might have them do a separate competition with different words, or an actual spelling bee, or just give them the day to marvel at the late entry kids' struggles with basic-to-them vocab. Depends on your kids.

The first two rounds are "warm up" even though the answers still count. I say the word in Spanish or French and they respond with English. If a kid gets the word wrong, or cannot say the word in the time allotted (8 seconds is good), then I simply put an X over their name. In a "real" spelling bee, kids have to exit the "stage" but I figure that's kind of harsh. You could do it, though, if you are into the public humiliation factor!

I announce the round number as I begin the round, which means that I am back to the first kid in the first row, and then just go down the rows, calling on kids who are not yet "out." If I run out of words on the list, I just go back through and ask them again. (This is cool because kids end up hearing the words in English and Spanish over and over, so it is just another study session, if you really think about it.)

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It is important to keep track of the number of rounds the class competes through, because the first-place winner in the class that goes to the most rounds gets the Big Class Prize for the year. This prize is for ALL classes, at ALL levels, regardless of whether or not they were using the same vocabulary lists.

When we get to the end of the round in which there are only six or eight kids remaining, we switch to the "Winner's Circle" and all eyes are on the best word-offers. If you have a few students who just know EVERYTHING, then you might need to do what I did when Carmen and Elisa were competing in French a couple years ago.

It was getting close to the end of the period, and we were on Round 68, and they had literally gone through the whole list twice, and it was clear that no one would emerge the winner. So, in a stroke of teacher geniusborn-of-desperation, I said, "The final rounds include spelling. You must say the French word, then spell it correctly." This eliminated Elisa in . a few rounds, and Carmen was crowned the winner and scored a doughnut party for her class, because they went to the highest number of rounds.

Well, there you go! Fun times at the end of the year, and lots of vocab memorized without too much work on anyone's part. I hope you and your students like the Word-Off as much as we did!

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