Get 'em Game - How to play and what it is

Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 10:45 am

I made some rock-paper-scissor cards for a couple sets. The game is called Get 'em. I use the game in a war type card game fashion where students lay one card down at a time and the winner gets all the cards. In the event of a tie students would lay a second, third ... card down.

After winning is where you can have the students do any number of things.

simple: just have the students say the vocabulary word
intermediate: have the students use each word in a sentence
advanced: have the students relate all the words from the cards they win in a sentence or 2

There are more things you can do with the cards and they can be used for other card games just like the small cards.

I hope to have a more detailed explanation and a template for you to make your own Get 'em cards in the future (both text and images.) They make great cards for sight words.

For now please post any questions or feedback here.

There are Get 'em cards for the fantasy and passive card sets

MES-Addict Joined: 22 Jun 2006 Posts: 28

Hi Mark
I was looking at the get 'em game cards on your site, but never having heard of it am still a bit confused as to play it...
How do you determine which student is the winner after they have laid down the cards?
And does everyone lay down one card in a round and then determine the winner or does it keep going around until there is a winner?

Thanks for your help!!

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 10:20 am

jenipa - The Get 'em game is something original that I thought up. Well... it's based on rock-paper-scissors.

Rock beats scissors. Scissors beats paper and paper beats rock.

After we have covered the vocab and the students have a decent grasp. I usually just deal out all the cards to the students. It's best to have about 7-10 cards per student. Then the students can battle each other in pairs or groups of 3. I let them get up and move around.

The students say 'Ready. Go!' and lay one card down face up on 'go.'

You can give out just a few cards and let them know once they have run out of cards, come to you and you'll give them a few more.

I've also played that there are 2 winners in each game. The person with the most cards AND the person who runs out of cards first. That encourages them to play instead of running away and trying not to lose their cards.

I hope that explains it a little better.

MES-Addict Joined: 22 Jun 2006 Posts: 28

Thanks Mark,
I was being a bit dense in that I was wondering how the winner was determined from the vocab on the cards, rather than the rock/scissor/paper victor.

Great idea, I'm def going to try it.

xx jen

MES-Member Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 4

So for 7 to 10 cards per student, my class is a small group of 16 students. That's 112 cards if I give 7 to each. Does that mean you have a deck of over 100 cards for each vocabulary set?

Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2007 10:02 pm

mathew wrote:

So for 7 to 10 cards per student, my class is a small group of 16 students. That's 112 cards if I give 7 to each. Does that mean you have a deck of over 100 cards for each vocabulary set?

Well, all of the card games are a bit of work for larger classes, but yes. My largest class is 7 students, so 3-4 sets one grouping (passive verbs or phrasal verbs for example) are enough.

I don't make individual Get 'em cards for every set though. I only have made them for fantasy 1 and 2, passive verbs 1 and 2, and phrasal verbs 1 and 2. I made the files for sports but never actually printed them out and made the cards.

If I deal with larger classes, such as my college classes, 40-45 students. I generally play with just the plain cards and yes, I go in there with 300 Get 'em cards or 250 yes/no game cards.

I teach quite a few small groups and so I get a lot of milage out of a complete set. Also, at the nursing college I have 5 classes a year that size (every year.) So, again, it's worth the effort now to go ahead and just make all the cards.

If you only have a few cards, you can give out one to every student. When on student loses, they come to the front and ask for a new card. That will keep the game going.