pronunciation baseball

Draw a baseball diamond on the board. Divide the class into two teams.
Each team takes turns "at bat." One by one, ask students different
pronunciation questions. (These can be individual words, like "pnemonia"
or "premise" or "indict" or "salmon", ones that are not pronounced like
they are spelled; alternately, you can give two similarly spelled words
with different pronunciations, like "tough" and "dough", "steak"
and "beak", "blood" and "brood", "through" and "thorough"...Anything
your students have trouble with is good). Here are the rules:
Whenever a student is "at bat", he or she cannot be helped by other
students.
If the student answers the question correctly, the team advances one
base. (A total of four questions must be answered correctly before
the team "scores" a home run).
If the student is incorrect, the team gets one "out." Once the team has
three outs, the other team will go up to bat.
Play until you run out of words. It's good to prepare enough words so
that everyone has at least one chance up at bat. I usually write the
words in big letters on pieces of paper beforehand, but you could also
post them on the board.
I originally used this as part of a larger lesson on baseball and
baseball idioms (right off the bat, go to bat for, hit it off, etc.)
but it can also be used by itself, and it works well as an informal
diagnostic tool.
- I also like to give an extra point if the person can give the definition as well. This works especially if you are using word wall words that they should already know the definition of.
Karin Abell,
Carrboro, NC