I am REALLY excited about this giveaway because I love games and I love comprehensible input!
Click on the image to learn more about VERBA!Tonight's giveaway is a deck of VERBA cards. VERBA is a card game that, in layman's terms, is Apples to Apples that provides Comprehensible Input. In their hands, students hold high frequency cognate nouns in their hands. Instead of matching the cards in their hand to adjectives (as they do in Apples to Apples), students select which of their nouns best completes a sentence in the target language. Currently, there are VERBA sets in Latin, English, French, Spanish, and Chinese (Japanese will be available soon). If you teach a language for which there is no VERBA set available, you can still enter the giveaway! You will instead receive a copy of Terry Waltz's TPRS with Chinese Characteristics: it's an excellent how-to-TPRS guide for teachers of ALL languages!
I was able to attend a session at ACTFL by one of VERBA's developers, Kevin Ballestrini, and I left with many new ideas and some reminders for ways to take traditional activities (such as dictations) and use them as a tool to provide students with comprehensible input. He and the rest of the team at The Pericles Group are working hard to develop innovative twists on classic games and activities so that they will provide comprehensible, FUN input to students! One of the many things that I love about the VERBA project is that the developers have made contribution to the World Language teaching community a priority over profit--you can actually download VERBA sets for FREE or create your own using their clipart!! This is a great option if neither you nor your school can afford to buy a set. Having the actual set does, of course, impact student engagement (not just a homemade game by teacher...this thing is legit!), and its purchase supports The Pericles Group and allows them to continue developing more products for us to use in our classes!
Wow, you're still reading? You must really want a VERBA set! (Who wouldn't!?) To enter tonight's giveaway, here is your task: leave a comment on this post with an explanation of a game that you play in class that provides comprehensible input to students. If the explanation is already written up somewhere in cyberland, you can provide the link instead of typing out the instructions. If at all possible, please try to share a game that has not already been mentioned by someone else. If all of your games are taken, though, you can add a duplicate game and elaborate on what the previous commenter wrote.
Once you've left your comment on this post, you can click here (or on the image below) to enter your name in the giveaway. All entries must be received by 10:00pm EST on Tuesday, December 8! (And remember, you can still enter the first night of Hanukkah's giveaway until 10:00pm EST tonight, December 7!) Winners have 24 hours to claim their prize before it gets passed on to someone else. Happy Hanukkah!
Click on image to enter to win a VERBA set!
