It is well known that children like playing board games. And we as teachers have to use this to our advantage in order to introduce games and gamification in the classroom. Not every day, of course, because that’s not possible, particularly with older children, but once in a while it’s good to break the classroom routines and use games for them to learn English in a more playful way. One of their favourite games is Trivial Pursuit, a very popular game for many years. It’s possible to play to this game online, but I have found out that it’s more fun for them if they can interact physically with the game, use the board and dice with their own hands, etc. We have a Trivial in Spanish in the school, which is for the best, cause as they explained to us in a gamification course I took last year, this type of games are not easy for the children if we use original English versions, cause they have many questions related to their culture and it’s very difficult for the children to get the answers right, so they get frustrated easily. So they recommended us to use a Spanish version and adapt the questions from Spanish to English. Of course, they have to answer the questions in English, but we as teachers can give them clues or help them with the difficult words they haven’t learnt yet in the classroom.
Usually we do this in sixth grade, because the pupils are mature enough to understand and answer questions with some degree of difficulty.
So we prepare the board, we make two teams, we roll the dice, and let the fun begin!!
