[little sage]

nbedwell,

I love your opinion-card game. I'll have to try it, it sounds like fun!

I was teaching phrases to express different degress of certainty "I bet..." "I'm sure..." "It's likely..." "I doubt..." etc. And yes, just like you said, after the expressions were explained the students would revert back to using boring old "I think..."

So I put up a list of the expressions on the board, then I read out statements about myself. In pairs, students had to decide whether or not they thought it was true and give a reason. For example, Me: "My mother has 100 cousins". Students worked in pairs with the expressions referenced on the board to decide their answer, (they had to persuade their buddy and then come up with one answer per team), each pair would give me ONE answer. For example, "It doesn't seem likely your mother has 100 cousins because you're from Canada and it's a modern country" (boy, were they surprised when I gave them a lesson on French Canadian Catholicism). Anyway, if they didn't use an expression off the list I wouldn't count their answer -actually, I would hop around pointing at the list until they corrected themselves. I recorded their answers on the board before revealing who was right, then I counted points.

It worked well as a "get to know your teacher" activity, but you could use instead a list of weird facts and trivia.

Hope this helps. I hope I get a chance to try your game this week, I'll let you know how it goes.

Karen