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No present generation will ever know the joy of games from the old school. The digital era, with thousands of games packed up in the app icon, is rapidly erasing the ones used in the classrooms or the playgrounds during breaks. That is why I, as a teacher, refuse to let them go, mainly because kids love them, and they have proven to work in class. Learners have the chance to play outdoors and leave the screen for some time and even make some of them with their own hands. I always try using as many games in class as possible, and some of them adapt perfectly to the teaching points learners need to incorporate in a more communicative and fun way. The first game is Bingo, yes, believe or not, some of my 8-year-old students have never played it before. It is an excellent game to play at any age and can be adapted to almost all types of vocabulary to revise in class. It also encourages the training of the ear so that it could be a good listening activity. When kids are more familiar with the game, we twist it, and they can fill the squares with any content they have previously learned or be in charge of calling out the words. Back in the primary school in the 90s, we would all have a "sapito" (Spanish for cootie catcher) in our school bags. It was a combination of craft, and a quiz to learn everything from your friends (and crushes). I always use it in class for the revision of vocabulary with the youngest. With older kids, it can become a communicative activity since they may ask each other different sorts of questions, especially at the beginning of the course, to get to know each other. Another vintage game from my childhood is the paper plane. It was always a challenge to make it fly because there were no online tutorials, so knowledge and mastering came from older generations like our parents or grandparents. Of course, it is a bit difficult to make one at the beginning because many students get impatient or are just not keen on craft activities. But once they get it, learners love it. I usually use it to encourage the creation of identities (who the pilots are) for higher levels and revision of vocabulary for the lower level. I use posters on the wall, and they have to point at something in particular for different purposes (recall the name, spelling, descriptions, or make interrogatives). My final favorite is hopscotch. Although it is not the most popular among teenagers, young learners are still eager to play it. Kids get the chance to go outside and move around for a while. They can draw it on the floor with chalks, and carefully choose their stones. Hopscotch is flexible so that you can practice spelling, speaking, revise any vocabulary they have been studying and have fun. Me, being considered a millennial, I will always appreciate the blissful childhood I had thanks to those games before video games and computers took over. They were simple as ABC but entertaining and helped me make a lot of friends. That is why I bring them to life each year in the classroom because the new generations get to play without using any touchpad; they socialize, they encourage the use of multiple intelligences, and students learn at the same time.
