Plus Haut/Plus Bas: A Fun Way to Practice Numbers

Have any of you ever seen the Price is Right?  Remember that game where you have three different prizes and you have 30 seconds to guess the price while Bob/Drew tells you higher or lower?  While thinking of a way to practice numbers with my students, this game came to mind.

I haven't quite figured out how to apply it, but I'd love to do some sort of contest where each student has a partner and they have 60 seconds to get as many right as possible.  It could get boring having only one group go at a time in class, but there also needs to be some accountability.

In the meantime, I came up with a different way to do "plus haut" (higher) and "plus bas" (lower).  Remember the Who am I? game I discussed in a previous blog post?  This is VERY similar to that.  I put slips of paper with numbers written on them in those badge holders (I HIGHLY recommend you get a set of these.  I use them a lot for games and whatnot.  They're awesome because you can keep reusing them for different units by putting different slips in them).  I give each student a badge but put it around their neck backwards so that the number is on their back.  Then, they must figure out which number they are.  They guess a number and whoever they are asking has to say "plus haut" or "plus bas".  Once they figure out who they are, they turn the badge around to their front.  This not only requires number knowledge on the part of the asker, but also of the teller.

What am I?

I'm really in this mode lately trying to encourage vocabulary retention.  My 1s are currently learning about "faire les courses" or food shopping, so I did an activity that not only enhances their vocabulary, it also has them using the target language.  It's an activity called "qui suis-je?".

I made cards for each food vocabulary word and tied string to it.  Each student gets a food item behind them (like a backwards necklace) and they have to ask yes or no questions to their classmates to figure out what they are.  Because they are French 1, we wrote a list of questions we could ask on the board in order to keep them in the target language.  Questions like, "can you buy me at a boulangerie?", "am I red?", "am I a vegetable?", "do I say moo?"...things like that.  They have to go around the room asking their classmates yes/no questions trying to narrow down which food they are.  Once they figured out what they were, they turned the card to their front side.

I found that it worked really well.  They had to rack their brain for the possible vocab words they could be in order to narrow down their questions and then guess that they are.  One class did it perfectly without English, the other got into English a bit.  I tried to do it that if they heard someone speak English, they could take that person's card.  However, I didn't like that.  They ended up fighting and also it then made that English speaker even LESS likely to use French later.  I'm still trying to figure out a fix for that.