Vocabulary revision with a table and a guillotine

This is my absolute favourite technique for vocabulary revision. I use it all the time. It's almost certainly been 'discovered' thousands of times already - it's hardly revolutionary, but I think it's the simplicity that makes it so cool.

(I've made a little 5-minute film using Jing to show me working through the process, which means I'll explain a bit superficially here and then hopefully it'll all make sense when you watch the film at the end. The technique involves creating a table with MS Word, adjusting column widths, tidying up borders, deleting columns, sorting alphabetically, etc. I discovered on a recent training course that I was running that many teachers don't know how to do these things, or are unaware of many of the time-saving tools on MS Word. So as well as showing you my teaching technique, I'll also use this post to showcase the wonders of the Tables and Borders toolbar - one of my top three toolbars.)

First the old version - the one I used to do. I've been making vocab revision worksheets for years - using the 'tables' function on MS Word to create a 5-column table (with 20 to 30 rows for the actual vocab items). In column 1 you type the word, or the beginning of the collocation, or whatever. In column 5 you type the definition, or the end of the collocation, etc. In column 2 you insert numbers 1 to 20 (or however many rows you've got) and do the same with letters in column 4. Column 3 stays empty - it's for students to draw connecting lines from numbers to letters.

The next step is mixing up the two halves of the sentences. The quickest way to do this is to cut the last column and paste it somehere else. Then use the 'sort' function to sort it alphabetically (don't worry - I'll show you how in the film). Then you just paste it back in its original position. Hey presto, a matching exercise. You still need to adjust the column widths to make it look pretty and all fit on one page, and clear the borders in the middle column (so students have space to draw their lines), but once that's done, it's ready to print.

As I say, that's what I used to do. It's good for revising vocab, but it's not much fun to do in class, so I used to find my students wanting to do it as homework, which kind of defeated the object. (Which was, of course, to fill up some class time).

So I had the brainwave one day of cutting it up and turning it into a 'sort-the-slips-of-paper' exercise. Now this is a vast improvement. Where before students were working alone, in silence, a bit bored, now they were working in teams, standing up, moving around, racing to be the first team to complete the challenge. It's communicative! It's kinaesthetic! It's a change of focus! It's fun!

There were still a couple of teething troubles. the slips of paper were too small and fiddly, so I found a quick way to make them bigger (see my little film). Students preferred to have something to take away with them, so I started printing a class set of non-cut-up worksheets for them to keep. This had the additional advantage that early finishers could start matching the words on their complete worksheet while the slower groups were still messing around with slips of paper - so nobody is sitting around bored or feeling cheated because they didn't have enough time. Of course the second time they match the words (on the worksheet) it's much easier - that's because they've learnt something. There's even a chance for a third time: they fold the worksheet vertically (through column 3) so they can only see the beginnings and then test themselves or a partner to try to remember the endings.

And that's the technique. It's useful (vocab revision is one of my key obsessions), it's fun (a challenging team game), it's great for classroom management (when they're looking a bit glassy eyed, you can pull out the game) and, best of all, it takes about ten minutes to make.

(If you're really clever, you can plan carefully to save time at the guillotine too. If you make sure all the rows are the same height and all start at the same point on the page, you can slice up a whole set for one group (say, 4 or 5 pages) at the same time - no need to sort them into separate little piles afterwards. I've got some good techniques for guillotines, but I can't work out how to film that on Jing, so you'll have to take my word for it.)

Anyway, here's the film (it's my first attempt at film-making, so excuse me if it's a bit "experimental". You may hear my son playing in the background!):


By the way, the text I used was one from Management Today on 'Offsetting'. If someone tells me how to insert the actual documents into a blog post, I'll upload those too. Cheers.