High Town - character cards

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High Town High is a town on a small island in the Pacific Ocean. It has an international high school with students from all over the world. Each card has a ton of information about each of the students. Using the information, your students can talk about the High Town students, ask questions about them, become the personality, create roll plays or skits, and play games using the cards.

High Town Cards

This is the second generation of communication games like this. In 2006, I made the Big Town cards and they are similar, but the Big Town cards were designed for very simple introductory language. The High Town cards contain information to use with more advanced sentence structures and target languages. They are best suited for upper elementary, junior high or high school students. They were also designed to contain aspects that teens might be asked about or would want to know from each other.

Printable versions of the cards:

card set one (8 characters)

card set two (8 characters)

card set three (8 characters)

card set four (8 characters)

card set five (8 characters)

card set six (8 characters)

Each card has:

The Passport: on the top of the card is a passport that contains the name, d.o.b., place of birth, age and height of the character. It also has stamps for the countries the character has been to.

This section is useful for language like:

'What's your name?'

'Where are you from?'

'How old are you?'

'Where were you born?'

The stamped section can be used to practice the present perfect:

'Have you ever been to Japan?'

'How many times have you been to the U.K.?'

Here are the flashcards for famous cities stamped in the passport. If you need to teach the countries as well, I have flashcards for countries as well.

Personal Information: below the passport you'll see some personal information about each character. It has their cell phone number, email address, boyfriend/girlfriend status, and after school sports. Each student plays 2 sports.

This section is useful for language like:

'Can I get your cell phone number?''

'Tell me your email address.'

'What do you do after school?'

'How many years have you played soccer?'

The Report Card: Each card has a school report card with the student's homeroom teacher, year, class schedule and grade for the class. The grades are based on the American grading system. A+ is the best grade you can get. Also, each student studies 2 foreign languages and they have one more elective course where they choose between history or P.E.

With the report card you can ask or talk about these things:

'What grade are you in?'

'Who's your homeroom teacher?'

'What class do you have 1st period?'

'What do you have after science class?'

'What foreign languages do you study?'

'How long have you studied French?'

'What grade did you get in math?'

More work with the grades section:

'What are you good at?' - -> 'I'm good at English.'

'I'm not good at science.'

'French is easy for me.'

'Spanish is difficult for me.'

'What's your best subject?'

The Dreams Section: this was set up to discuss future events and what the characters 'want to' do. It's supposed to look like the character actually wrote this part in. That's why the fonts are different.

This section is useful for language like:

'What do you want to do in the future?'

'What will you do after high school?'

'What are your dreams/goals?'

The Favorites Section: contains, well ... a bunch of favorites. They were chosen to represent a few things teenagers might want to discuss. However, I wanted to do more than just 'What's your favorite?' I wanted to incorporate some more wh-question words and also make them more conversational.

This section is useful for language like:

'Where's your favorite hangout?' - ->'What do you do there?'

'Who's your favorite singer?'

'What's your favorite website?'

'What's your favorite movie?'

'What kind of movies do you like?'

'What are you in to?'

The When ... Section: this was something I need for my own students and one of the reasons I wanted to make these cards. The whole section is designed to practice the two clauses 'when ...,' or 'if ...,'but can be used to practice the subjunctive in hypothetical speech.

This section can be used for questions or to talk about things like:

'When it's sunny, what do you do?'

'When it rains, I like to read a book.'

'If it snows tomorrow, what will you do?'

'If it's sunny on Saturday, I'll play soccer.'

'When I'm on holiday, I like to go to the beach.'

'What would you do if it were raining?'

'If it had been a holiday, what would you have done today?'

There's a lot of information on the cards, but I worked very hard to keep the card from appearing cluttered. These cards can be used to practice third person singular, present perfect tense, when clauses, if clauses and the subjunctive form. And, all of this can be used in a game!

The High Town Game:

Students try to guess their partner's information. The first student to guess the other's information gets to take their partner's card. Students continue to play and the person with the most cards at the end is the winner. For a more detailed explanation of the game, see the instructions with the Big Town cards.

These can be used as a communication game in other foreign language classes, like French, German, Spanish and more, but unfortunately the cards are in English. So, the students will need to be able to convert the English in to the foreign language you are teaching.

If you have any questions about this game or suggestions for variations, post them here, or you can always email me.