Teaching colors?

Today I “sprinkled” a non-traditional activity into the classroom. According to the curriculum I need to follow for the first twenty days of school, today was the day I was required to teach colors. For high school students this is a topic that is as interesting as grocery shopping with your parents. For myself, as a language teacher focused on communicative skills, I was dreading this day - how often do we talk colors? I figured this would probably be a good opportunity to step out of my approach and try something non-traditional and influenced from my constructivist class. I decided to not think about teaching and instead play an easy game that involved colors. Speaking absolutely no English (a department policy), I came to class with a bunch of colored 2 x 2 cards and started to play a card snatching game. The rules of the game are fairly simple: two players stand with a desk between them and their hands to their sides. With five colored squares laid out in front of them, as soon as they here me call out a color, the first person to snatch up that colored card from the table wins a point.


The game was simple, tons of fun for us competitive folks and yielded surprising results. I did not speak any English to the students and they managed to play the game, recognize the colors, and enjoy the game in about five minutes. We played almost the entire period and then I debriefed the activity at the end with a quick assessment. All students learned their colors and enjoyed themselves with what I thought would be an otherwise boring topic. The greatest surprise for me was my reaction at the end of the activity. The break from the teacher-centered environment energized my spirits and allowed me to enjoy observing the class rather than conducting it.