Last November, we celebrated Thanksgiving with the kids. This year, we wanted to do something different, so we picked the theme “ocean kingdom”. This time, we also hosted three games. They are Coloring Game, Fishing Game, and 123 Freeze.

Planning

 

Before playing the games, we will have a vocabulary teaching session. Since the cheat sheet worked out really well last time, we decided to continue using it. The kids were avid learners, using chinese phonetics to spell out the sound of the terms.

Coloring Game

At first, the plan was to make the pictures on the cheat sheet into coloring pictures. But the club members came up with a better plan — they decided to draw their own coloring picture. (Credit to Elaina and Dora) The kids are to fill in the right color for each animal or plant. If they color in correctly, they get rewarded.

 

Reflection: I think this game was really successful because it granted peace. The kids were surprisingly compliant and follow the instructions given.

 

Fishing Game

In this game, the students will have a string with a magnet at the end. They will dip the string into a bucket and see what they fish. If they can name the thing they fished correctly, they get a point.

Reflection: Originally the plan was to let a bunch of kids fish at the same time. But this plan failed because there were too many kids in a group. So we decided to line up and play one by one. I’m pretty proud of this game too because the kids were trying their best to name the ocean animals correctly. They used their cheat sheet wisely. The only problem with this game was that there was only one bucket, which means everyone is lining up waiting for their turn most of the duration of the game.

Improvement: Double or triple the same game so multiple kids can play at the same time.

 

123 Freeze

For this game, the kids will first learn the moves of each animal. One person will stand in the front and count to 3, when he or she turn around, a vocab picture will be shown. The kids have to freeze and correctly act out the animal shown. If they don’t, they are out. The first person who reach the end gets a point.

Reflection: This game was not as successful, namely because it requires greater movement, aka chaos generator. The bunch of kids moved when they weren’t suppose to. But the good thing was most kids followed the instructions. It was just that at the end we couldn’t really see who got to the end first, because it was just a bunch of kids running at us. It was quite scary tbh.