A favorite ELL Strategy of mine is Find My Match. The students love to play this. It gets them up moving and interacting with each other.
Purpose: To develop reading, listening and speaking skills as well as learning a new concept through interaction with class members.
Activity
• Each student is given an index card or vocabulary card that matches information on another student’s card.
• The students walk around the room reading aloud the information on their card. They find their match and read the information on their cards to each other.
• Teacher calls time.
• Each team shares their match with the class. Examples: Homonyms, vocabulary words and meanings, math problems and solutions.
Examples:
Below are some different examples of ways to play using this ELL strategy.
A teacher from my school wrote, ” I give one student a noun in the singular form and they have to find a “match” with someone who has the plural form of that word. For example, toy- toys. While they are walking around they are telling the word on their card and if its singular or plural, the plural cards have to tell what made their word plural to help “find their match”. Partners use academic discourse to discuss together thier words and how the plural was formed.”
Another teacher writes, “During our unit of study on nonfiction, Find my Match was a good strategy to help teach and reinforce text features. After several lessons of learning the text features, I passed out the text feature name or an illustration or example of the text feature to the students. On go, the students went off trying to find their match. Once they find their match, they read the cards and discuss. Then the students switch and do it again.All students are engaged and participating. Lots of excitement.”
You should give it a try! Please leave me a message of how it went for you and your students! Click here to learn another ELL Strategy called Slice of Pizza.
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