Teaching Tools: Making Greek More Interesting…

Let’s face it- language learning is both exhausting and, dare I say it, boring sometimes. I am currently teaching masters level basic Greek and in the curriculum here students take Greek as an elective (meaning I have to make it interesting and useful or they will drop the class!).

I have built into the course plan that one hour every two weeks or so we do ‘Review and Tutorial’. In these sessions, I try to do reinforcement activities that are fun. We will sing songs, work on fun projects together and play games. Today we had our first sessions. We played kuklos eudaimonias (wheel of fortune), which I made up. I broke the class into four teams of four. Then each group was allowed to request the revealing of a letter in a Greek sentence I made up. (I only showed the number of letters in each word and the number of words in the sentence).  The catch is, each team had to answer a grammatical question before asking for a letter to be revealed.  They only got one chance to reveal a letter per turn.

Each time a team had a turn, they were allowed the chance to guess the sentence after answering a question correctly and choosing a letter.  But, if they guessed the whole sentence wrong, the team would lose their next turn.

What kind of sentences did I do?  I am in the 3rd chapter of Duff (Wenham, Elements of NT GReek, CUP) which only allows me to do present active indicative verbs and nominative and accusative nouns (and the article).

All in all, this educational game was a success.  They students reinforced their grammar through the questions and got to see Greek sentences materialize before their eyes.

I got this idea from my Hebrew professor (Paul Overland) who did this same game when I took Hebrew and it was a real hit.

I would like to hear from others what other ‘fun’ activities in Greek (or Hebrew) they found helpful.