Clue

I've always wanted to play a sort of classroom game that involved mystery and detective work and problem-solving in groups. The classic all-time favourite board game Clue always appealed to me as a great game involving a lot of suspense and interaction. I just remember how much I loved playing it when I was younger. However, I never knew how exactly I would implement the game in a classroom environment... Draw the gameboard on the board? Project a gameboard on the screen? And how would they move their pieces? Magnet on the board? Draw with a marker? Several weeks ago, I finally came up with a plan of how I could deliver the game to one of my current favorite kids' class, Young Leaders 1. The class size is comfortable and small, at about 16 students; the group is bright, inquisitive and enthusiastic, with students in the age range of 10-13; and their English level is great, capable of conversations on everyday topics and completely able to express their feelings.


The kids enjoyed playing it so much the first time that they requested we play again two weeks ago. Below are pictures from our own classroom-adapted Clue game. There are 4 teams of 4 students, each controlling a character that has to go from room to room and make suggestions at the details of the murder: who is the murderer? what weapon did he/she use? where did he/she commit his murder? Through deduction and the gathering of clues round by round, they are able to figure out the truth.


I used unit vocabulary so that students could revise and engrain the recently learnt English vocabulary in their repertoires. These were the clue cards for our last game:

Murder Weapons:       Murder Sites:
Statue                           Train
Sword                           Cruise
Suitcase                        Home
Lorry                            In the air
Van                              In the ocean
 

   

Murder Suspects:

 So in essence, students had to produce sentences like "The School Choir killed the baby with a statue on a cruise" all throughout the game. Um... okay... in retrospect, hearing a sentence like that sounds quite violent and graphic!!! But... the students themselves chose the baby as the victim of the game... And, well just pay attention to the form and not the content! It's great grammar and vocab practice! But most importantly, it is great fun and really engaging!!!

Note: I created Mr. Maya based on the unit we had on ancient civilizations, which included the Mayan Civilization. This way they can practice saying Maya and remember it better.

  

 
 

Typhoon Pakhar!!

Last Sunday, a severe storm, Pakhar, hit South Vietnam. I didn't know how bad the storm was until I rode around town the next morning. The storm started out as a typhoon in the South China Sea last Thursday, but luckily it degraded into a tropical storm when it hit South Vietnam. Nevertheless, it still caused great damage, upending hundreds of trees across the city, tearing the concrete ground with them, and damaging about 700 homes as well as creating floods and landslides. Unfortunately, two people perished because of it. 

A student from my adult English class told me that this was the worse storm in Vietnam since the 1940s. Another student rebutted and said since the 80s. Yet a source online tells me that in the last 100 years, there had only been 3 other storms: 1904, 1996 (Ernie), 2006 (Durian). Also, I could not find the meaning or origin of the word Pakhar, and the only results that Google yielded were the storm itself... So perhaps the name was coined just for this storm?

  

My story

Hello! My name is Sofia Ngo-Trong, and I was born in Montreal, Canada. I grew up and went to university in Toronto, and after working for an insurance company for 1.5 years, I took the bold first step concretizing a life-long dream ... I moved abroad to my parents' motherland, Vietnam, to the crazy hectic city best known as Saigon. This is a blog of random tidbits of my life in a part of the world that is so drastically different than anything I'd been used to in my old life.



From Toronto...

My lovely mother and sisters...

To crazy Saigon...