This is a little game for students to play with a partner (MAYBE a group of three) to review the events of a story. We used it for Chapter 7 of El Nuevo Houdini, since the students seem to get confused about who went where when and when who called whom about what. Phew!
- Start with a story. For example…”Bobby goes to Walmart. He buys fish, then he goes home. He eats the fish, then he gets very sick. He goes to the hospital, and they have to give him an IV. Thankfully, he got better and was released after just 36 hours.”
- Write ten pairs of events that you’d like students to compare with respect to time. (Ex: Bobby goes to Walmart/Bobby goes to the hospital, He eats fish/He gets an IV, He goes home from Walmart/He goes home from the hospital…you get the idea.)
- Fill in the worksheet (email me if you’d like the editable version) by writing the two events from each pair on opposite sides of a rectangle. Switch the order in which you write them (sometimes, the event that happened first should be on the right; sometimes, on the left).
- To play the game, have students place the worksheet between them. Each person should have a writing utensil.
- You, the teacher, should read both events in the pair in the order in which they appear on the page (even if that is not the correct order).
- Then, call out either “PRIMERO” or “SEGUNDO” (FIRST or SECOND).
- Students must race their partners to mark the numeral 1 (if you called out “first”) or the numeral 2 (if you called out “second”) on the event to which it corresponds. For example, if you read “Bobby goes to hospital/Bobby goes to Walmart” and then called out “Second”, students must try to beat their partners to write a 2 on the half of the rectangle that says “Bobby goes to the hospital”, because that happened second (after Bobby goes to Walmart).
- Rinse and repeat for all ten events. The partner that correctly labels the most rectangles first wins. Anything that they label wrong counts against them.
Here is the template that I used: First, second team game