Relay Writing

In this game pairs of students compete to write words quickly on the whiteboard. The twist is that each student in a pair gets their own marker and they have to alternate writing each letter! It’s excellent for reviewing before a vocabulary test or just for fun.

I made this game because I wanted to find a fun and competitive way to get my students to practice writing key vocabulary, but the problem with having students compete as individuals is that there will be some students who nearly always win (boring) and others who nearly always lose (demotivating). Such variation in ability is normal and comes about for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this blog post. The challenge was finding a way to compensate for these individual differences. What I came up with was a game wherein pairs of students need to cooperate to write words, allowing for gaps in one student’s knowledge to be filled in by their partner.

Who can play

This game is suitable for students who are able to write words independently while under some competitive pressure. The minimum number of players is four per round, but many more can play as well.

Materials

You’ll need a whiteboard and several whiteboard markers of at least two different colors. The wider the whiteboard and the more markers you have, the more students can play at once. You’ll need a few whiteboard erasers, too.

How to play

Pick at least four students and divide them pairs. If your whiteboard is large enough and you have enough markers, you can play with even more pairs at once. Send them to the whiteboard and have each student pick up a marker. Each student in a pair must have a different color marker than their partner.

Say a word. Each pair of students has to cooperate to write the word. One student of a pair writes the first letter with their marker, then the other student writes the second letter with their marker, and so on, back and forth until the word is complete. They are allowed to help each other while they’re writing. Then they replace the caps on the markers and announce loudly that they’re done. The pair that finishes the word first and without mistakes is the winner.

Variations

• Groups of three kids can be fun as well. You’ll need another color of marker and the words will have to be long enough so that everyone gets to make enough of a contribution.

• I often play a variation of this game with full sentences. In this case I have the students alternate writing every word or punctuation.

• During the last few rounds I like to pair students with … themselves! When this happens they’ll need to figure out how to write using two markers at once while alternating the colors. It’s never not funny to watch.

Considerations

• Some kids can be extremely rough on markers. Maybe don’t let them use your favorite ones.

• You might not have enough erasers so that every pair has their own, so they need to share. If this happens this you designate areas at the bottom of the board between groups where the shared erasers can stay when they’re not being used. Otherwise students won’t be unable to find one when it’s needed. In my classes a draw little homes where the erasers “live”.

• You’ll need a way to fairly pick pairs of students and perhaps also to keep points, if that’s something you like to do with your students. I use small pieces of paper with my students’ names on them. Marking points on them is easy and I can choose to shuffle them between rounds to make random pairs or, if there’s a wide variance in ability, assign students to pairs that are well-balanced.