Guessing in Foreign Language Class

I have recently read an article from a fellow blogger about promoting guessing in language learning. It talks about how to help students choose when and how to make better guesses. I really enjoyed reading this article because it not only talked about the statistics about how different guessing strategies can help our foreign language students, but it also talked about how to help your students choose good guesses. On top of the article was a picture of the game “Guess Who?” This was always one of my favorite games as a child and it hooked me right away! I thought back to how the game was played and have decided that this could be a great learning tool inside my Spanish classroom. In Spanish, there are two verbs that mean “to be” in very different circumstances. One of the verbs , SER, deals with characteristics of people. By using this game inside the classroom, the students could learn how to give and ask about different characteristics in a hands on, interactive learning activity. I’m not going to go out and buy 15 Guess Who games because board games are a racket these days, but what about creating your own boards? All you need is a set of pictures of people with different characteristics that you could probably find in clip art, laminate them so they last forever, put them together, and then start playing!