[veryv]

You can get rid of the death sequence all together by playing hangman more like the American game show "Wheel of Fortune." Instead of being penalized for wrong answers, students can be rewarded for correct answers.

I read about one really motivated teacher who actually went to the trouble of creating a prize wheel, like the actual game show. I didn't even want to attempt that, but I did make two big pair of dice out of some boxes and assigned point values to all the possible combinations. Since I'm in Japan, the unlucky number 4 equaled "bankrupt" and I arbitrarily assigned another value as "lose a turn." Everything else was worth points (or yen in my case because I printed up some fake money, but you don't have to get that complicated). I divide the class into teams, they roll the dice and guess a letter. If the letter appears on the board the team receives (the value of the dice) times (the number of times the letter is in the word or phrase). So if you roll a dice combination with the point value of 1000 and you guess the letter "e" and it appears twice in the phrase, you get 1000 points X 2, or 2000 points. If the letter does not appear in the phrase, I don't take away points (though you could if you want to be hardcore), we just move on to the next team.

At this point, there is more than one way to proceed, but here's what I do. In order to keep everyone engaged, if a team has guessed a letter correctly, they get first dibs on trying to solve the puzzle. If they can't solve it, it's up for grabs for any team. If no one knows, we move on to the next team to start it all again.

My kids like it because they think rolling the big dice is goofy and funny and they like to get paid, even if it's fake money. It's complicated to explain, but simple to understand once you just start playing it, you just have to lead them through the steps of roll the dice, guess a letter, get some money, and they figure it out rather quickly.

Hope this makes some sense. Good luck!