Foreign Language Small Group Vocabulary Review Activity

Students enjoy this activity that is fast paced and interactive.  I call this game “Vocabu-Lettre” in French, “Vocabu-Letra” in Spanish and “Vocabo-Lettere” in Italian.  It is basically played like the game Scattegories, but with only one letter and category at a time.  This Powerpoint Template has the three language versions.  Choose the two slides of the language that you want to use and copy the second slide as many times as you would like.  The animation copies with the slide.

Prepare the slides by typing in a category and a letter in the category and letter boxes. Put students in groups of 2-3.  Click on the slide and the category and a the letter are revealed.  The timer then begins to count down from 20 to 1.  It just takes one click to set everything in motion until the timer runs out.  While the timer is running down, groups write as many words in the category that they can that begin with the letter.  Once the timer runs out, all teams stop writing.  Team one then begins reading their list to the class, one word at a time.  If another team has that word, no points are scored.  The team only gets a point when they are the only ones to have a particular word.  Then move to the next team.  With each team this will go more quickly because they will have eliminated (crossed out) the words that they heard from previous teams.

I usually use small white boards and markers in this activity and I also typically use the same category with 4-5 letters before changing the category. It is also a good idea to give students some phrases in the target language to use during the activity (“We have that word too”). This is a quick and fun way to review previously learned vocabulary so that it stays accessible to students.