Advanced Adjective Fisherman's Trawl

Working with teachers actually, thinking ahead and planning with them ,is definitely one of the best ways of  generating a new and useful approach or tweaking to practising the target language.It's a way of meeting both the teacher and learners’ needs and next steps. Today at staff CPD was a perfect example!

I was sharing with the teachers a very simple game with adjectives and mimes called Fisherman’s trawl (which I recently added to the blog).You can read the original idea in this blog on nouns, verbs and adjectives.

We were discussing the potential of the original game with Year 4 to practise and internalise adjectives when we realised that this game could be made more advanced and become more of a challenge for UKS2 learners. 

The original game is about working in pairs and is a miming and guessing game.

The advanced game involves the children working in teams,using adjectives for extended feelings e.g. “ tired “ would be a good example . 

We ask the children to extend the feelings they give with a reasons…..”I am not okay because  am tired “

It’s a simple extension of the original game and it gets the children to think in Year 5 and 6 whether they should say in French and Spanish the following verbs before the adjective either :

“ je suis/estoy “or “j’ai/ tengo”.

How to play Advanced Adjective Fisherman’s Trawl.

• Put the selected adjectives below on to cards and stick the cards to the whiteboard.

calor/chaud

sed/soif

frío/froid

triste/triste

hambre/faim

feliz/heureux.

• Divide you class in to teams – boys/girls for example.
• Invite a child to select without sharing an adjective from the whiteboard. They must mime the adjective. 
• Can the team guess the adjective? As this is advanced fisherman’s trawl firstly the team only has two guesses (unlike the original game where there were four guesses) and the team wins two points for a first correct guess and one point for a second correct guess. If they can’t guess correctly, it gets passed over to the other team.
• The team that’s guessed the adjective correctly can now get the "fish in the net" and gain two bonus points by deciding if the adjective goes with :

estoy/ je suis   or tengo/j’ai

Simple but effective, building on a previous game and developing a learning tool which can be used at different levels with different stages of language learners!