Family ELT Travel Fun – “Paperback”, For Students too!

*Note: This is not a commercial post and I have no connection whatsoever to any company. Just sharing the joy.

The lookout
Naomi’s photos

Are you fond of games which require forming words in English?

Have you found that the younger generation prefers having extra “twists” to word games, such as cards with double letters (“ed” “en”) , cards that have powers to get you an extra card , replace or duplicate a card, and even earn you extra points?

Do you like games which can be less competitive and encourage the whole family to collaborate on figuring out a word with the hand dealt to one player?  Note: It can also be very competitive, it depends how you want to play it, despite Mom’s non-competitive bent…

Now bear with me for a moment.

A Smart Move
(Naomi’s Photos)

Our son taught us the board game “Paperback” and it’s a great thing at any age for a family to gather around a table to play together. Since this game is good for developing vocabulary in the English  language, I like the game even better.

But I didn’t think of traveling with it.

You know, space and weight in the suitcase, a table is needed and it takes some organizing of the piles of cards, etc.

Well, there’s an app for that.

For the first time in my life I bought a game app for the tablet.

And now the teacher-in-me is considering using the game, in app form, in class.

It turns out that the app solves more than the issue of making the game convenient to travel with ( we played on the airplane with the tablet in airplane mode) , it seems that it will also solve the following issues

* No precious lesson time wasted on setting up the game.

* The app basically teaches you the game as  you play, so no lengthy instructions or learning curve required. It tells you what kind of action is required next.

* It keeps score. That might sound obvious but since points determine all kinds of perks during the game, it’s important to know how to calculate the score. I’m very bad at score keeping in all games, sigh…

* The app won’t accept misspelled words or invented words. Your offspring or your students can play independently without you worrying that they are blithely giving themselves points for nonsense and reinforcing errors.

* There is a single player mode,  a student can play against a computer with three different levels of difficulty, thought frankly I haven’t explored this mode much yet.

In short, Paperback has won me over as a family game. I’m looking forward to trying it in class.

That is, if our English room ever gets those tablets we’ve been promised…

 

 

 

 

 

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