The Amazing Race!

Today my German 1 students played The Amazing Race. It's a fun review activity to wrap up the year, review for finals, and take advantage of warm weather. It's an activity I purchased a few years ago on Teachers Pay Teachers (Spanish version), so while I can't share the version I use, I'm going to talk about it and encourage you to check it out!

Basically it follows the premise of the reality show - students are competing in teams to accomplish various challenges. Accomplishing a task earns them the next task and so on until they're the first group through the "race." Each challenge reviews a specific vocabulary, culture, or grammar topic we've done this year.

Materials I need:
- Challenges printed out and ready to go (this year I color coded them for my own sanity)
- Sidewalk chalk & sidewalk space to write
- Outdoor space large enough for the whole class to spread out but small enough you can easily keep track of everyone
- Envelopes to organize each group's materials (not necessary and something I tried out this year - I included a pen and a pencil plus their first challenge, this way students didn't need to bring anything outside with them; I also asked students to put their completed challenges in the envelope so there wasn't any loose paper flying around
- Clipboard and pen

Students reviewed: verbs, the alphabet, geography, school/classroom vocab, numbers, and plural forms. Some of their challenges involved running, drawing, jumping jacks, and push ups.

All in all, I think it was a fun day :) Students got to run around outside while getting in some review, and it allowed me to see areas where the class struggled (the alphabet, geography, and plural forms were HUGE problem areas for the class as a whole, whereas they breezed through the verbs and school vocab). I found a few areas where I could make some tweaks to hopefully get a few more successful teams next year!

- Frau Leonard