Make practice fun

We are motivated to keep doing things that are enjoyable and rewarding.  Finding learning and practice activities that are enjoyable and rewarding means looking for:

• A balance of novel and familiar
  The feeling of mastering a new challenging activity can be very rewarding, but the comfort of doing an activity that you've already mastered can be nice at times, too.

• A variety of different activities
  Even the most fun activity becomes tedious if done too often

• Both collaborative and competitive activities
  A little competition can add excitement to practice, but it can also be demotivating for some students who are more comfortable with collaborative activities.

• Both individual and collective activities
  Collective activities can feel safer for many students until they develop some trust and confidence with their learning situation.  Individual activities allow more reticent students to shine without being overpowered by more vocal students.

Here are my favorite games and activities, and some of the pros and cons for each.

 The digital games can be played in online classes, but can also be played by learners independently (outside of class), or in an in-person class with a laptop and a projector.  

Note:  Since almost all of my learners attend class via Zoom on their phones, I don't play any games that require the learners to log in to the game individually from their devices during the game (like Kahoot), since this is very difficult to do on a phone while also attending the Zoom class.  We play games where the students can call out the answers, that I and the teacher enters in the game.