Are you feeling boxed in by the limitations of hybrid teaching?
Are you missing the fun of kids playing a game and smiling and being goofy?
I certainly am! I feel like the joy has been sucked out of teaching because we are trying to teach students at home and in-person while also maintaining the social distancing guidelines! It feels so hard to do anything!
I tried virtual matamoscas (you know, the flyswatter game?) today with my hybrid students and it almost made me feel like I was in a normal class again.
You can see a video of how I did the activity here. Once you get an idea of the activity, you can skip to 14:30 for the extension activity.
Here’s how it went:
- I created a jamboard with images from a video. (I only created one slide then I duplicated the slides.) I also created sentences in advance that describe the photos.
- After doing a movie talk with video and follow-up reading activities, I started the game.
- I assigned groups of students to a team. That team corresponded with one slide on the jamboard. Students added a sticky note to the jamboard with their name on it.
- I did a practice round in English where I called out sentences and they practiced moving their sticky note to that picture.
- Then I did several rounds of ‘matamoscas.’
- When finished, students used their sticky notes to caption 1 sentence. I praised their captions and (tried to) described why their caption was done well (it used our new vocab, it added details, it was a compound sentence, it used dialogue, etc
Advantages:
- You can see that the kids are actually understanding the words you’ve been using!
- Students can interact! And kids at home can play against kids at school.
- It is a sneaky way to give more input.
- It’s completely paperless and there are no materials to clean up or reset.
- Playing in small groups made students accountable to each other.
- Unlike matamoscas on paper, I can easily scroll through and see how everyone is responding!
- It’s joyful!
- Students can use the sticky notes to write to each other.
Disadvantages:
- As you saw, kids have free rein of their slide and can go a little nuts. I allowed it because I just needed some goofiness in my life. I will curtail some of that in the future.
- It takes a few minutes to prep the slides.
Tips:
- Make a new copy for each class so you don’t have to reset the sticky notes after each class.
- You could use this for any level, just scale the language difficulty up or down.
- Start with easy sentences, then more complex sentences.
- For more ideas, or to use this lesson, visit the previous blog post.
If you have been doing matamoscas in your virtual/hybrid class, what other tips or tricks do you have? If you haven’t, try it out this week or next and see how it goes!