Every class I teach roughly progresses the same way.  I’ll start with motivated and assiduous students who are confident in their abilities and are ready to battle the exam.  Time goes on and about halfway through, my quirky jokes and light-hearted idiosyncrasies have lost their punch – my students begin to daydream about the joys of household chores.  So I adapt, and for vocabulary, I try to incorporate vocabulary games.  This was how the Vocabolympics started.  It’s basically a set of vocab games that you can play individually or as teams.  Ideally, get many people involved, get competitive, get motivated again, and try to get a parent or older student as a moderator. 

Disclaimer: You will have much more fun with this than you expect.  (Most people expect to have zero fun with this, and if you have a little bit of fun, that is infinity percent more fun than you expected.)

Here are the events.

Cartoon mneumonics - remember them?  If you don’t, basically they are eccentric ways of remember certain words.  For example, the word “patronizing” might elicit a memory of Joan of Arc, the patron saint of France, or it might make you think of patriots in the American Revolution.  Whatever mneumonic comes to mind is great, as long as you can incorporate that memory device with the actual definition.  Have the judge pick a word from a list, and take 2 minutes to make and draw a cartoon mneumonic.  The team with the funnier/wittier/more artistic cartoon wins.  Make this a best of 5 competition.

Vocab replacement words – A perfect essay has some mastery of language, including vocabulary.  I read a plethora of essays with the sophistication level of a chimpanzee.  My written suggestions to employ more mature words falls on deaf ears (blind eyes?) so I made up this competitive exercise.  Have the two teams each have a single sheet of paper.  The judge gives them a sentence from an essay with an infantile or gauche word.  The team has 10 seconds to replace that word with one (and only one) that is more erudite.  This game can get crazy – judge has to pick the better word.  Here is a quick sample list I made up.  This is basically a synonym game in context.  Check out my “Essay Vocab Therapy” file for a list of good words to play with.

Continue to Vocabolympics Pt 2: Anish's idea of a great time