Grouping Activities

What are these grouping activities? How do they work?

Each deck has a different focus, but basically there are words/phrases/word parts on the cards. Three cards in each deck have something in common and form a group. The groups may be based on similar meanings (love, like, care), collocations (path, follow, take), suffixes and affixes (un, real, istic). Shuffle the deck; pass them out; have students figure out what their group is.

Why?

The grouping activities form random groups and can easily be used to separate bad pairings. They can quickly reintroduce a topics. They are fast and fun.

Can I see some examples?

• Here students make groups by finding people who have the same part of speech from words in the Academic Word List -Sublist 1 & 2
• This activity make sentences to form groups, using words from the Academic Word List-Sublist 3 & 4.
• Here students form multi-collocation to make groups, practicing words for the Academic Word List-Sublist 3 & 4

:) Special thanks to Lena Koessler, my teaching methods instruction at PSU, for teaching me about this type of grouping activity.