There are a lot of great things about my amazing Japanese teacher Kathryn Tominaga…not only am I learning loads of language the easy way, (guys- turns out that Comprehensible Input *actually works*!) since she’s halfway around the world from me, she knows tricks and strategies and activities and games that we don’t even know about here! They’ve got a hopping CI Scene Down Under and a big conference coming up!

A while back, Kathryn introduced me to “Complete Cloze” She learned the strategy from Lana Thorp at the Japanese Language Teachers’ Association of Victoria Conference, and Lana learned it while working with the JET program. We can’t pin down exactly where the idea originated, but it’s loads of fun and I couldn’t wait to try it out with my Little Darlings! This is a winner: they were so focused figuring out the puzzle while we played this week in Spanish 2 AND Spanish 4.

It’s sort of like a gamified predictive Write and Discuss puzzle. Here are the adaptations that worked in my classroom and a video so you can see it in action:

UPDATE: Steve over at Flippity.net created a Flippity to make this even easier to create and play in class!! Read on for the details of how to play and check out this post for the High-Tech Complete CLOZE Flippity to make your teacher life easier.

Prep:

Make a copy of the template here. On Page 2 of the template, write out a simple text based on a story or image. This is your “Key”. Type in one word per space and be sure to use language that is familiar and comprehensible for your Little Darlings, with an emphasis on your current vocab structures. This was my first go at it and my text felt a little too long…Next time I will limit the text to 50 words to speed up the game a bit. Here’s what my Key for the Movie Talk Alma looked like:

Then transfer all the punctuation to page 1 (but leave the words out). I enlarged the punctuation to make it really obvious. This is the sheet you’ll copy and pass out to your Little Darlings:

Then figure out the best way to project this for your students to see. If you have a Doc Camera, that would work great. I dropped a screenshot of the student sheet into a slideshow and then used my smart board to annotate on top. I suppose you could also type into the blank document as well…you just need a way to reveal the answers as they guess.

To Play:

Set up teams: Divide class into teams. Teams of 3 students worked well…for an even number of students, two groups of two students would be preferable to a group of 4 students. Each team needs at least one copy of the blank document…but my Little Darlings do best when everyone has something to work on, so I like to make a copy for each student. (and for squirrely classes who need even more accountability, I collected the sheet after the game as well!)

Explain points: Each round, each team will have the option to guess a word or a sentence. (On board, write “word” and “sentence” in your target language so you can do this without English). For each word they guess correctly, they get one point for each time the word appears in the text. In my example above, “La” appears 13 times, so the team that guessed “la” earned 13 points. If a team guesses a word that doesn’t appear at all, they earn zero points and it’s the next team’s turn to guess. Instruct everyone to write down the words that don’t appear on the bottom of the sheet or back, because there’s nothing worse than guessing a word that we’ve already learned doesn’t appear in the text!

As words get filled in, teams will start figuring out whole sentences, especially if it’s based on a story you’ve been working with. When it is their turn, they will announce “Sentence #____ through _____”, to indicate which sentence they’d like to guess. Before they guess, the teacher looks at the sentence and determines if the sentence should be worth 5 or 10 points. (For me, if there are one or two blanks that need to be figured out but the rest of the sentence is filled in, that’s worth 5 points. For ones that have a lot more blanks to guess, those are worth 10 points). The team guesses their sentence, if their guess is perfect, they earn 5 or 10 points. If not, play continues to the next team. If I’m feeling benevolent, I might say, “No…no aparece la palabra “nueva” and everyone adds “nueva” to their list of words that don’t appear in the text.

As teams guess words and sentences, consult your answer key then fill them in for the whole class to see, while the Little Darlings copy it down on their Complete Cloze sheet and discuss with their group for their next guess. It looks like this:

A few tips

You decide how strict you want to be with accepting words and sentences. In my Spanish 4s, with lots of different verb tenses and conjugations in the text, I awarded partial points. If they guessed “entró” but it should be “entrara”, I wrote “entr___” and awarded a half point. Another team could guess the correct ending for a full point. With my Spanish 2 babies, I’m more flexible: when a team guessed “atrapada” I awarded points for “atrapada” and “atrapa”. You do you!

To make things easier on me, a bag of poker chips (I teach in Nevada, it’s fine!) passed between the teams and the teams pulled out a chip for each point they won. Other teams kept an eye on them to keep them honest. I can’t manage awarding points and filling in the blanks- it’s just too much too juggle! In one class, two Little Darlings threw the bag across the room and it burst open mid-flight which ended the game immediately. #boundaries. I’m looking forward to trying this game again when 1st period pulls it together.

If this looks like fun, you know what will be really fun?! 9 days of workshops and culture with me and by bff Kara Jacobs in Segovia, Spain THIS SUMMER! We still have a few spots available and we’d love to bring you on the adventure! !