Kevin Tan
During April, the teachers set up two amazing house team activities, which is English Olympic Games and making the greatest trebuchets. On that day, during the first activity, it goes with two rounds, and has six tasks. Each house team needs to be divided into three groups. We played Boggle and Synonym. The most impressive game in my mind is Boggle.
For the game Boggle, it is a timed game (3 mins) where players compete to find as many words as possible within a grid of connecting letters (5×5). The letters that make up the words are horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. Players need to find as many words as possible. Every common word is one point. Each round has a significant word, and each word that is related to it, it will get two points. In addition, only the group that comes up with the words that other groups don’t have can score.
During the first round, two teams did a good job. They got 8 and 9 points respectively, and were far ahead of others. It is worth mentioning one to two groups often came up with some extremely short words like “OK” or “K.O.”. Then the second round was a deciding game. They used their creative thinking skills to be competitive in the game. However, all of them lost one vital word that played a decisive role. When the teacher spelled it out to them, they found it obvious, but really complex to get that word out. This competition was so intense that the score was tight between the first and second place. At the same time, this game encouraged players to think quickly and creatively while developing their word recognition and pattern recognition skills.
Next, for the trebuchets making, every team needed to design three trebuchets. The team that is able to make the greatest trebuchet will win, which means the trebuchets that can throw the marbles the farthest will be the champion of this game. Each team are provided with skewers, glue guns, rubber bands, bottle caps and marbles. At the beginning, each team had a designer to make blueprints. They used creative thinking skills to make plenty of fantastic designs. During the making process, the team members often use critical thinking skills to come up with the disadvantages of the designs. Also, they had to use communication skills to cooperate with other members. In the end, some teams even created some crossbows which could shoot a long distance. However, the teams were supposed to obey the principle of trebuchets. As a result, it did not count. But the various kinds of trebuchets were impressive, and they had a competition to judge the greatest one.
These two activities were unforgettable, since it not only improved our English skills, but also helped us promote core competency skills and relationship between classmates.