Episode 388: Two Grammar Games That Replace Worksheets Without Losing Rigor

Today’s Teaching Middle School ELA episode is all about grammar games that actually work. Not the chaotic, overcomplicated kind—but the print, pass out, play, done kind. I’m sharing two of my favorite low-prep grammar games that feel like recess to students while secretly delivering serious skill practice. Easy to reuse, simple to set up, and engaging enough that kids forget they’re doing grammar. Let’s go. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Why These Two Grammar Games
• 1:17 EB Academics Mission And Portal
• 2:29 Game One: Digging For Treasure Setup
• 4:47 How Gameplay And Checking Work
• 7:06 Why Treasure Keeps Students Engaged
• 8:01 Game Two: Grammar Tic-Tac-Toe Setup
• 9:40 Writing, Validation, And Variations
• 11:22 Routines, Differentiation, And Templates
• 12:32 Try It This Week And What’s Next

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Well, hello teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Today I want to give you two of our favorite grammar games here at EB. And when I say favorite, I don't mean like the cute ones from Pinterest that are chaotic or that take 40 minutes to explain or that require a ton of laminating on a Sunday night. Like that's not what we're doing. These are very simple. Print, pass it out, your students play, you're done. And these are the kinds of games that are gonna feel really fun to your students, but they're secretly reviewing those grammar skills like sentence types or pronouns or whatever it is that you're teaching. These can be adapted to almost any of our grammar concepts that we have to teach. And the best part that I love about these two different games is that you can reuse them all year long just with different skills. So today I'm gonna walk you through game number one is called Digging for Treasure. And this is like a battleship style game. And game number two is grammar tic-tac-toe. And so I'm gonna explain them so clearly that you could set them up tomorrow with your students without even looking at anything else other than just listening to this podcast episode. All right, let's dive into the games and I'm gonna explain them to you. Hi there, ELA teachers. Caitlin here, CEO and co-founder of EB Academics. I'm so excited you're choosing to tune into the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Our mission here is simple to help middle school ELA teachers take back their time outside of the classroom by providing them with engaging lessons, planning frameworks, and genuine support so that they can become the best version of themselves, both inside and outside of the classroom. And we do this every single day inside the EB Teachers ELA portal. This is a special place we've developed uniquely for ELA teachers to access every single piece of our engaging, fun, and rigorous curriculum so that they have everything they need to batch plan their lessons using our EB Teacher digital planner that's built right into the app. Over the years, we've watched as thousands of teachers from around the world have found success in and out of the classroom after using EB Academics programs. And we're determined to help thousands more. If you're interested in learning more, simply click the link in the podcast description. And in the meantime, we look forward to serving you right here on the podcast every single week. So, game number one is called Digging for Treasure, and it's essentially Battleship Meets Grammar. So, as I explain this to you, think about the game Battleship in your mind. And middle schoolers love this game, it's been one of our EV teacher favorites for many years. It's in a couple of our resources, and essentially students are hunting for treasure in this game. And for whatever reason, that just hooks them. Just the concept of hunting for treasure is fun for them. So you can use this with any type of grammar concept that has a right or a wrong answer. So for this example that I'm gonna walk you through, students are working with identifying sentence types. So, like, is it a compound sentence? Yes or no. Is it a complex sentence? Yes or no. Um, you could do this with parts of speech, verb tenses. So anything that has like a right or wrong answer is what you can use this for with that type of grammar concept. All right, so the prep is super simple. Each pair of students is going to get two things that you'll have to put together. The first one is a treasure board sheet. And honestly, you can just have students use graph paper and they need to like section off one five by five part of the graph paper and list A, B, C, D, E on the left side of that five by five section, and then one, two, three, four, five along the bottom of the five by five section. So they're essentially creating like the game board where they're gonna play. So, in theory, if you're using graph paper, students could have like multiple game boards per one single sheet of graph paper. And then the second thing that you'll need, and this is something that you'll need to put together, is a list of sentences that align to the grammar concept that you're teaching. So, in this example, we're working with sentence types. So I would ask ChatGPT to come up with 20 sentences that have different examples of simple, compound, complex, and compound complex sentences. And of course, you want to check what ChatGPT comes up with to be sure if it's correct, but that's it. So I would have those 20 sentences on a piece of paper per pair of students, and then each student has their game board on their graph paper, and that's literally all that you need for this. So here is how to set it up, what to tell your students, and how to play. So the first step is that students need to bury their treasure. So each player has their little graph paper, right, with their five by five sections set up with A through E down the left and one through five across the bottom, and they have like their battleship board on their graph paper. Well, each player is going to secretly color squares on their five by five grid. So they're gonna hide one square, which is a small treasure, they'll color that square in. They'll hide two squares in a row, that's like a medium-sized treasure, and then they'll hide three squares in a row, that's the larger size treasure. So they're coloring in six total squares on that five by five grid. They can place them horizontally or vertically, they can touch, but they can't overlap, right? Like in Battleship, you couldn't overlap the ships on the board. And then once they're colored in, obviously they can't change them. And then that is how students bury their treasure. So you might need to have like folders up so that students can't see each other's graph paper or maybe it's in their lap or whatever it might be, but it needs to be hidden from the player that they're playing with. All right, now they're gonna actually play the game. And step two is to take turns answering the grammar concept. So for example, player one would read the first sentence on the list of sentences that you've given your students. And player one will read that sentence and they will identify the grammar skill in that example. In this example that we're doing, it's identifying the type of sentence. So for example, player one might read the sentence and they might say, This is a compound sentence. Now, if their partner agrees that it's correct, player one earns a guess to call out a coordinate. So they might say something like B4, and their partner is gonna check their board and they're gonna say hit or miss. And if they hit it, player one is gonna color that in on their board. And if it's a miss, they mark it as an X and then they switch turns. It's literally just like Battleship. And then they keep playing, they just go back and forth. They answer the sentence, they guess, and they mark. And until someone finds all three treasures, they keep playing. And the first player to uncover all of the treasures wins. Now, if you're using graph paper and students can set up like four boards on a piece of graph paper, you could put together 40 sentences with the help of Chat GPT. So imagine how much practice students are getting with this one grammar concept of sentence types with this one easy-to-play game that's really fun for students. So teachers love it, or EB teachers love it because it has built-in accountability, right? They have partner checking, there's tons of repetition. It is a game, so it doesn't feel like a worksheet. And as a result, students stay focused the entire time. So grammar doesn't become this thing that they hate. Like, this is so much more fun than doing any other type of grammar practice. And like I said, if students finish early, they can play another round with a new set of sentences that you have had Chat GPT create. So it's really nominal work for you. So that's game number one is called Buried Treasure or Digging for Treasure, rather. And it is basically Battleship Meets Grammar. All right, the second game is even simpler. This is grammar tic-tac-toe. So students are gonna be writing sentences for this particular game. And it's really, really great practice for them because of that. So instead of identifying just grammar concepts, they're actually creating the sentences themselves. So you have your tic-tac-toe board. It's set up just like a regular tic-tac-toe board, right? So you think of like the two the nine squares that you have, but above each square on the board, and like leave space in each box. So above each square, above each box on the board, you're gonna write grammar concepts like subject pronoun. And then in the next box, you'll write plural noun. And then in another box, you'll write reflexive pronoun. In another box, you might write noun ending in N-E-S-S. In another box, you might write object pronoun. You get what I'm saying? But you're putting those things at the top of the box so that there's space for students to write a sentence in that particular box. So you can use this with any grammar skill that students are working on, right? You could even do sentence types, whatever it is that you want them to practice with, that's the grammar skill or concept that you're writing above each square on the tic-tac-toe board. So basically how it works is students work in pairs, and each pair gets one of those tic-tac-toe boards that you set up, and then they have different colored pens or pencils. And so what students need to do is students are not placing X's and O's on the squares that they're choosing. Instead, they need to choose a square and write a sentence inside of that square. So if the square that they're choosing says plural noun, they might write the dogs ran through the yard, and then they underline the plural noun. Now their partner has to agree that it's correct or not. So it could lead to a little discussion. And if it is correct, then that square is theirs and they claim it with their color. So they might like shade it in with their color or outline it with their color. If it's wrong, their sentence is wrong, they don't get it. There's no point, and that sentence gets erased from that particular square. Now, students just follow the rest of the format of tic-tac-toe, right? Just like normal tic-tac-toe, they're trying to get three in a row and they just take turns going. So you're looking for horizontal, vertical, or diagonal, and the first player to three wins. Now, if there's a tie, students just fill out the rest of the board for extra practice. And you can even add like little challenges for your students if you'd like with random accompanying tasks. So you might say something like, use three words in one sentence. That makes it so much harder, right? But students get weirdly competitive and creative with those little challenges that you can add in as well. So you could make multiple tic-tac-toe boards like this with just different grammar concepts that you want students to practice in each square. So it works really well because every square requires writing. It's instant grammar application, right? We're not just identifying, we're actually applying. No one's just sitting there. It's super low prep, easy differentiation, right? You could change the boards for students who need extra support. You could add hints for students who are going to be challenged. You can make it more difficult with more difficult grammar concepts. So you can swap out the board for really any skill. Like you could do pronouns one week and verbals the next week, sentence types after that. It's the same exact structure every time. You just have new content that you're putting into the tic-tac-toe board. So, what I love about both of these is that they are routines, right? You could do this over and over again with different concepts. And so because students know how to play these games, they their brain power goes toward the grammar that they're working on, right? The cognitive load on them of having to learn a new game goes way down because they've played these games before. It's just a new game with a different, or I'm sorry, it's a new concept with the same game that they know how to play. Um, and so if you are an EB teacher inside of our portal, you can actually find these templates inside of the membership. So the tic-tac-toe game is actually in the parts of speech splash bash resource. And the digging for treasure game can be found in a few different resources, but the one that's easiest to find is the sentence types resource inside of the Eevee grammar program. So if you want to try this this week with your students and you're not an EB teacher, the directions that I gave you should be more than enough to get you started. And if you do try it, send us a message over on Instagram at Eeve Academics. I love hearing which games your students are obsessed with, how it goes with them. Because let's be honest, if they are arguing about grammar during a game, you have already won. All right, you guys, I will see you next week on the podcast. We have lots of fun stuff coming up this month. Next week, we're talking about five easy steps to create a virtual field trip. We're bringing Pat back onto the podcast, our curriculum writer, to talk about that with you. I am sharing my Friday whiteboard planning system, which is my favorite thing ever. We're talking about a March Madness poetry bracket, how to use that in your classroom, and all kinds of fun stuff coming up for you guys this month on the podcast. All right, you guys, thank you so much for joining me, and I will see you next week. Have a great day, everyone.