Civil War Vocab Games: Can be used for other subjects

Choice Project: Civil War Vocab In this choice project I will walk you through a couple vocab activities made for a Civil War Unit in a High School History class. These activities consist of a memory game, a jeopardy game, and a true or false game show. Each one of these is designed to really check for understanding with the students and help them to work on the key vocab and content from this unit. There is also opportunities to be able to do these games at home. A small version of the memory game will be given out to the students to take home, including all the memory cards. Also, the jeopardy game will be put online so that the students can go on and play to really test their knowledge and get into remembering these key vocab words and events. These three different games hit many of the multiple intelligences and will really help the different learners be able to test their knowledge and become engaged in the content they’ve been learning about. Memory Game Memory is a common kids game where kids test their memory with cards. Flip the cards to reveal what’s usually a picture, but for this one we’re playing with vocab words and events to match their meaning. Just flip over a card and try to find the second card that matches it. This game will be played on decent sized cards on the floor of the classroom. All the tables and chairs will be pushed off to the side and the students will gather in the middle. There will be two games going at once, one half of the class at one game and the other at the other game. These teams will be picked randomly by counting off by two’s. The instructions bellow will be posted on the bored. The students will have a given amount of time to complete and while they play there will be Civil War music playing in the background. They will then count their cards and see who won. We will then discuss the which cards they had problems with and maybe go over them a little bit more if it seems like a good amount of students are struggling with the same words. This way I know that we’re all on the same page for the most part. Then I will give them each a mini version of all of the memory cards in a baggy to be able to bring home and study. Instructions on How to Play: - You will be shown some cards with their faces down. - Select two cards. - Check the card out! - If both cards are the same, those cards will be removed. If they are different, remember what is on the card so you can try again later. - When you get a match you get to go again! The game is over when you have matched all of the pairs and all the cards are gone. Jeopardy “Jeopardy is an American quiz show featuring trivia in topics such as history, literature, the arts, pop culture and science. Unlike other game shows, Jeopardy! has a unique answer-and-question format in which contestants are presented with clues in the form of answers, and must phrase their responses in the form of a question”1. Jeopardy is a game with a number of categories and different levels of questions that fall underneath each category. We will be playing Jeopardy with the a civil war unit twist to it using the vocab and content we’ve been working on. The students will be handed a card when they enter the room at the beginning of class and will need to sit at the table where the name of their card is; this will be their groups for jeopardy. Each table will have a points sheet so that they can keep track of their points, a scrap paper for communication purposes, and a Final Question answer and bet sheet. The rules of the game will be explained and then the categories will be revealed with a slight explanation as to what falls under them. The team with the person who has a star on the back of their card will be able to go first. That team will pick the first category and question and it will go on from there. The winning team will each get 5 points on their next assignment. True or False Game Show This is a made up game by me that will take the facts, vocab, and other content that the students have been working on and turn it into a mind challenging, heart racing game of true or false that will keep them on their feet and really test their Civil War knowledge. I will have small (half sized) poster boards lined up across the whiteboard and each one will have a fact on it. There will be 5 “doors,” which will be labeled above the poster board on the the whiteboard, which each poster will be under. There will either be 4/5 that are true or 4/5 that are false and the students need to pick the poster board that the odd one one is under. When they pick they get to choose a door that they think is right and the teacher will “look behind that door” to see if they got the answer correct. If they did they get 100 points and if they didn’t it gets opened up for the next team to take a shot. Turns will rotate in a circle. If they pick up a question that another team got wrong it doesn’t use up their turn. Each turn there will be a different set of posters set up on the board to choose from. At the end of the game there will be a sudden death round, much like the Final Question in Jeopardy, where they can wage as many points as they want. The team who has the most points at the end of the game gets an extra 5 points to put on an upcoming homework assignment.