The fact that Language Adventures Quiz Game Show doesn't promote higher-order thinking skills doesn't mean it has no use in the fourth- to sixth-grade classroom. It offers a good way for teachers to gauge what students know and also helps refresh their memories when it comes to preparing for a standardized exam. It's also fun for students to play, so using it as a time-filler or as a way to get students involved at the beginning of class could help them build confidence in their skills and review key bits of knowledge at the same time. It may also play a role in the ELL or low-literacy classrooma where students need to build some of that basic background ELA knowledge to help them understand more difficult concepts.
Continue readingStudents can opt to play Language Adventures Quiz Show as a single team of one or with up to four teams of any number. After determining factors such as the number of teams, whether questions should be timed, or if they want to turn on audio narration on the question cards, students select categories. Each game features four categories chosen from a list of 11. Categories include forms of writing, reading comprehension, sentence structure, study & research, grammar & usage, and story elements. Once the categories are selected, the Jeopardy!-style game begins. The more multiple-choice questions a team answers correctly, the more points it earns. Hidden among the cards are double and triple bonus cards to give teams even more chances to pull ahead. The team with the highest point total at the end wins.
At the fourth- to sixth-grade level, students should be focused on building their higher-order thinking skills and applying their knowledge to creative scenarios. In Language Adventures Quiz Game Show, they don't have that opportunity. Instead, the questions simply test whether students have a good base of ELA knowledge. While some categories, such as Study & Research, Reading Comprehension, and Story Elements offer a little more than just identification and recall, they still focus on simpler concepts, such as recognizing basic cause-and-effect scenarios or determining the plot of a short story. In the categories that require basic identification and recall skills, some questions are below grade level. For example, the parts of speech category has students identifying nouns and adjectives, which are typically covered in lower grade levels.