[little sage]

This week I'm reviewing the last half of the textbooks with my elementary kids and I needed to cover a lot of material that they hadn't seen in a while. Of course they get antsy until I throw out the word "game", so this is what I did. I think it worked fairly well.

1) divided kids into pairs, matching stronger and weaker students
2) got out my box of coloured paper squares which I use for bingo chips
3) piled a stack of scrap paper from the recycling bin on each of their tables
4) asked a review question from the book
5) students worked in pairs to write their answers on the scrap paper
6) after a 5-4-3-2-1 countdown, students held up their papers
7) all correct answers got a point (a coloured paper square)
8) bonus point for all perfectly spelled and punctuated answers
9) alternated between which student of the pair wrote the answer
10) counted points at the end of class, gave reward to the pair with the most paper squares.

I would also suggest taking points away for using a language other than English. I think they had fun and didn't realize they were studying. One glitch is that the writing really slows the game down, so we didn't cover quite as much as I would have liked.

If anyone has any other activities for large-scale reviews, please let me know. I'd like some altenatives for when I get bored of this one.

[bridgid]

I do something similar to this but instead of using lots of scrap paper I have a supply of coloured A4 paper laminated.
The groups/pairs are then given a whiteboard pen.
I call out a review question - generally a vocab question. The first group who raises their 'board' with the correct answer (must have correct spelling) gets the point.
The students then have to wipe the board clean (so take in some tissue for each group).
A new student in the group now holds the pen. Make sure they change writers otherwise the strongest student does all the work.
When you ask the questions you might ask for more than one word - for example - 'three phrasal verbs using get'.
I have used this a lot for vocab review (general vocab/collocations/phrasal verbs/word families/dependent preopositions) and the students seem to love it - adults not children