Jeopardy

This is a little more complicated game that students often love.  

First, you need to make a table with five rows and a number of columns. The rows are numbered 100,200,300,400,500. The columns will be categories of questions, just as in the real 'Jeopardy' game. The values are the number of points the team earns when they get the question right. Additionally, they represent the difficulty of the question.

Each column is given a category. For intermediate classes, these are typically TAIWAN, TAIPEI, PAST TENSE, SPELLING, STORY, MAKE A QUESTION etc.

A beginning class might have CLOTHING, GREETINGS, TIME, BE... (verbs) and so on.

Begin the game by having a student from team 1 select a column and row, just like in Jeopardy. For example, let's say the kid selects TAIWAN for 100. Ask a simple Taiwan question, like "What city has the most people?" or "Name the tallest mountain in Taiwan." A 500 point past tense question might be something like "Who wasn't at home last night?" Only the selected student may answer the question. No other student from that team may help them. If that student answers correctly, then you go on to the second student from that team. And so on. As long as they answer correctly they control the board and may continue to select questions. However, if they blow it, then the question is open to anyone in the class. Anyone may now answer, but the other teams each must get a chance to answer before returning to the original team. Insist on complete, grammatical sentences. If players shout out answers to other teammates, you can penalize them by deducting 50 points. If no team can answer the question, give yourself the points. The kids really hate that.

The reason the board does not rotate between teams is that teams will sleep or talk if they do not have a chance to score at any moment when the selected player misses.

A variation is to supply the answer and have the students formulate the question. This is MUCH tougher.