This month we celebrated Christmas with the kids. Initially, we planned to do scavenger hunt by hiding clues in gift boxes. However, we end up ditching the idea because it’ll be too hard to monitor the kids and they may fight over gift boxes. So we still sticked with the station system. (and one of the members will be santa)

We designed the games to balance physical activities with indoor activities. The three games are Bingo, Rock Paper Scissors, and Snow Snow Santa. This time, for vocab teaching, we prepared Christmas edition treats as rewards for Santa to give out. I think preparing special treats creates incentive for the kids to participate during the teaching session. Also, the kids love Santa (Vincent). The vocabularies chosen are repeats from ones taught last year to help them review.

 

Bingo

We created different sets of Bingo so not all kids can win. Basically, the instructor will read out vocabularies and whoever can form a line on his or her bingo sheet first wins. Because most kids forgot the terms already, we pronounced the words one by one. They came up with a strategy by spelling the sound out with mandarin phonetic symbols. The bingo becomes their notes.

We learned a better way to teach them vocabularies. To make the games more effective, we need to review the terms beforehand first, working collaboratively by having one person as the instructor and the rest as helpers.

 

Rock Paper Scissor

This game is actually calmer than we expected. The kids lined up when instructed. But I think this game end up being a little bored because the kids started to wander to other stations before time is up. We need to work on modifying this game to make it more engaging.

(I don’t know what they’re doing in the second picture lol)

 

Snow Snow Santa

I think this game end up being the most successful out of the three. Again, the kids were surprisingly less chaotic that we had expected. The premise of this game is like duck duck goose, but the kids have to say “snow” and “santa” to practice their pronunciation.

I think a big part of this success goes to the helpers. They made the game fun by being very friendly to the kids and are all willing to be goofy with them. The balance between fun and discipline is important.