When substitution becomes an adventure. Part 2

So the second part of my substitution day today was devoted to Elementary group a list of which consisted of 7 people. However only two showed up at the lesson and I must say that the rest five would have defenitely regreted their decision if they had seen the Harry Potter game prepared for them. Other 4 teachers that work at that educational centre prepared a very nice quest for their groups, which my kids and I were offered to join. In no way I intend to take at least the smallest part of the glory of their project, I just want to note it down here so that it may inspire someone, help out with the topic or whateverelse. I must confess I would love to arrange something similar, with the same HP topic, for my kids at the last lesson. I will probably take the HP topic as a base as it's magical and fun although as it turned out some kids didn't even watch a single movie needless to say read a book.

For those who might find it useful and/or inspiring (and for myself aswell) I will shortly describe how the game went.

0) Do some lead-in, familirize students with the topic vocab they might need, arrange a small-talk on the topic, a lot of things might be used as a lead-in (I sometimes think that the way craftsmen collect and keep every little thing to use later as material, teachers do the same thing for lead-ins and ice-breakers/warmers with different kinds of music, videos, games, cards, whatever).

1) Divide all the students into four Houses. Be the hat. Ask questiones and depending on the answer divide students into for equal parts. You can do it with 2-3 students at a time to save time.

1.2) If your students are from different groups (like in the game I took part in today), play a get-to-know activity with each House, so that they can get acquainted and brake the ice a bit.

1.3) Give each house a paper to design their emblem and moto. About 10-15 minutes to draw and then 2-3 minutes to prepare presentation of their House infront of other groups.

2) First task. Real quest. All teams are given the first clues. They need to follow the lead and move around the whole room/building to find the next clue and so on. Here they can be given points/small prize/special items that will allow them to procede with further excercises.

They are in Hogwarts now, they need to attend lessons. So four groups go to different classes where different teachers and subjects are awaiting.

3) Potion challenge. About 10 differrent bottles with liquids of different colour are infront of students. They are given a riddle, a logical one. It has about 5-7 sentences and describes where which potion is. There 3 types of potions: killers, 1 potion that lets you move forward in the game, harmless liquids like juice or water. Students need to solve the riddle and find the potion that will let them continue their journey. If they guess it right they get 8 points. If they guess it right + tell which are killers and which are harmless, they get 10 points. If they drink a killer you can take points away from them.

4) Deal with Cerberus. You need to make the three-headed dog fall asleep by singing to it. Students are given fill-in-the-gaps song worksheet. They listen to the song 2 times filling the gaps. Check their answers with the teacher and then sing the right version all together. In this case it was a funny song about Harry Potter's story.

5) Vocabulary lesson. It was a stage filled with different wordsearches/quizzes/speaking activities/sharades/matching games. All of them were short activities so that children had a chance to play about 5 games in 20 minutes or so.

6) Wake up your senses/Potion lesson. Here students at first talked about senses and their importance. Then they were offered four cups, one at a time, filled with some mixtures of unknown ingridients. Just by smelling and/or tasting it they needed to guess the ingridients.

At each of these stages the teams could get maximum 10 points. So when they finished going through all of them they united all together in one hall again and teachers summed up their results. All the children got candys, The winning House got an additional prize. It all finished with a group photo.


Some of the children found this activity more interesting, some - less, of course. But it defenitely was a great last lesson where they had a chance to use different skills, apply knowledge, built a team spirit and have fun.

I am really glad that I could take part and watch this whole game being carried out.