A creative lesson plan: Studying Characterisation through Who Wants To Be A Millionaire

My creative lesson was aimed at a Secondary 2 Normal Academic class. One of the biggest issue with this class is getting them to complete written work. While they enjoy giving their opinions and/or talking about issues in the text, the thought of working on a worksheet bores them and immediately makes them disinterested in the lesson.

For this particular lesson, I decided to try and incorporate the game "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" into the lesson in a bid to get them to work on their worksheet.

To begin with I got mini whiteboards from Daiso ($2 each!) and divided the kids into groups of four. Once the student formed their groups, I handed out a whiteboard and a marker to each group and briefed students on what to do.

I downloaded the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire game template from the internet and used the same questions from the worksheet to create the game questions. This way the students will be doing the worksheet, just through a more interesting means. However, unlike the worksheet which would have required students to comb through their text (a play entitled 'Reunion Dinner'
) to find quotes associated with a particular characteristic/characteristics associated with a quote, I shortlisted four quotes/characteristics for the students to chose from. This was done to facilitate the playing of the game.

It looked something like this:


For each question, students are given 1 minute to deliberate with their team mates before they have to write their answer on the whiteboard. When the teacher says "Show me your answers", students will all raise their boards at the same time in order to showcase their answers. Each correct answer is worth 2 points. However, in order to ensure that the students are not just picking answers at random, an extra point is awarded to the group that can explain why a particular answer is the correct answer. This will ensure that students actually discuss and engage with the text, rather than merely point to random answers.

At the end of every question, students are to write down the answers in their worksheet. This ensures that students are still doing their worksheet.

The idea of a competition and allowing students to be doing something in this lesson made them a little more inclined to complete the worksheet.