I’m a believer in using games to educate and reward.  I have a class of first graders whose favorite game is a spelling bee.  Who would have thunk it?

Hot Seat! comes courtesy of a coworker.  It emphasizes speaking and vocabulary.  It’s a simple game that uses nothing more than a marker/chalk, a chair and a word list.

I’ve played this both as a team game with points and a just general activity.  Place a chair under the board.  Have one student sit in the chair so they can’t see the board.  Either the teacher or another student writes a word on the board.  The students not on the “hot seat”.  The rest of the students have to describe the word on the board for the other student to guess.

If you play in teams, put a limit on the time to give clues.  I disallow sign language no matter what.  Depending on the level of the class, the clues can be single words, phrases or full sentences.  Sometimes it’s fun for higher level classes to be limited to one word at a time because they have to work cooperatively to give the clues.

When I teach domain specific knowledge, such as science, I use the chapter or unit vocabulary as the word list.

If you try it with your students, let me know how it goes!