I first experimented with this activity when trying to make a very dull induction week session about contracts and school requirements a tiny bit more interesting. I’ve recently tried it as a way of practising quantifiers with my students. In both cases it went down really well, taking about 30-60 minutes from start to finish.
A bit of origami
You can prepare the paper before the session, or you can give students the instructions below to prepare their own.
- Take a piece of A4 paper (scrap paper is fine).
- Hold it landscape.
- Fold it in half, joining together the two short edges.
- Unfold it.
- Fold one half to the middle, and repeat.
The final result should look something like this:
Creating the questions
Ask students to fold the paper so that they can see the A5 half only (column 1 in the diagram above).
Give them a topic/task and a time limit to write as many questions as they can.
- For teachers in induction week, each group had a section of the contract appendix and a couple of other short admin documents.
- For students practising quantifiers, they could write questions on any topic they wanted to based on information they found on their phones, with two caveats: it had to be a gapfill, with the gap being a quantifier we’d just studied, and the question had to be something they thought other students could answer.
After each question, they should draw a line across all five columns/the whole A4 page.
They should also make a note of their answers on another piece of paper.
Completing the quiz
Students from group A pass their quiz to group B, and so on. B answer the questions in the right-hand column, furthest away from the questions (5 in the diagram above) – this is very important! Make sure that you check by asking a question when giving instructions and by monitoring closely (there’s always one group who write in the wrong place!)
When B have answered all of the questions, they fold their answers underneath and pass the paper to group C, with only columns 1-4 visible. C write their answers in column 4, then fold it under again. Group D write in column 3, and E in column 2.
Group A then get the quiz back and check the answers to find the winner for their quiz. The teacher then tells the class who won each quiz, and an overall winner is decided based on which team won the most quizzes. Be prepared for arguments! It’s better to base it on overall winners for each quiz than on the total number of questions answered correctly across all the quizzes, as different groups will probably have written different length quizzes.
My students
If you only have a small class, like I did, group B can write in column 5 and group C write in column 3, leaving space for their answers to be marked in columns 4 and 2.
Here are two completed examples from my mostly teenage students. I was particularly impressed by the not-quite-Monty-Python references. Some of the questions were quite controversial as multiple answers were possible, and they didn’t always understand the vocabulary used by other groups. This prompted debate afterwards, but they argued in English and learnt some extra words, so it was OK in the end! You can decide how much you want to vet the questions, but I think it’s more fun if the students are in charge.
So what else could you use this kind of quiz for?
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