I am still checking out the games and activities that everyone has shared. Very cool that there are so many, especially if I go back through the past posts... Takes a while though.

Ok, some of the games sound really fun, but for some reason I don´t completely understand how they are played.

For example, the game ¨Othello¨

I have read the instructions here- www.mes-english.com/games/gamestoplay.php
and I tried to see if the same question was answered somewhere in the old posts, but I didnt see it.

My question is, do the students start out with a number of cards or are all the cards in a draw pile in the middle.

My understanding is that they take turns adding a vocab. word to build onto the first 4 words and the sentences keep getting bigger and bigger. Is that right?

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I play a similar sentence building game where students stand or sit in a circle and pass around a long thin strip of paper. S1 starts the sentence with a subject, s2 adds a verb (in the correct tense), s3 adds a complement or time expression, and so on and so forth...

S1- My mom
s2- danced
s3- with a bear
s4- at the post office
s5- last March

At the end we read the wacky sentenses that they came up with and the students laugh and beam with pride at their own hilarious wit.

Hi Ashley,
Your game sounds fun (unfortunately too advanced for my students for now) but I have the impression what you're thinking of is actually quite different from Othello/Reversi, even though it could be played as a crazy sentence builder. Look here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversi

And Mark's very smart idea is to subtitute two-sided flashcards for the two-colored discs.

But whether I misunderstood you or not, I'm glad you asked because it will give me another game idea for tomorrow's classes, if I need one...

I use the Othello game to practice sentence formation. So, students are only making one sentence per card. For each card they 'win' and turn over, they will say one sentence. So, if I win three cards, 'eat', 'run', and 'sleep' and our target structure is the past tense, I would make sentences like:

- I ate pizza yesterday.
- My sister didn't run in the morning.
- He slept well last night.

If your students are advanced and you have a good chunk of time, you can have them try to use all three words in one single story or continue off of another story. But again, it can be just simple sentence formation practice.

The game set-up:
- You start with 4 cards in the center
- each player has a a small deck of cards to use in the game
- on each turn, players take a card from their deck and add them to the board

Does that clear it up a bit?

Obviously, I have never played Reversi. Actually, I had never even heard of it.

This game is different than what I was picturing in my head. I still don´t understand how the you determing the number of cards that they ¨win¨and are allowed to turn over.