For 3rd-years (9th graders)

I just sat here for about and hour looking around, staring at the 3rd-year textbook, surfing over websites, and brainstorming. I have at last come up with what I think would be a really fun idea for the third-year class to use the points I am supposed to cover. For now I'll call it "my-friends Bingo charades" for the first (present active participles - verbal adjectives), and "Dutch auction" for the second (perfect passive participles - more verbal adjectives).

But I really don't think both activities will fit into the time I have, in addition to the reading and translating the lesson.

Woe.

Now, I may choose one. The problem is, I think I am supposed to teach both points.

For the first game, each student would fill in a 4x4 bingo board with classmates' names (plus me, if not enough kids). Then, each student would draw a random a slip of paper with a command on it, but not show it to the other kids. I would draw one at a time, slips of the same commands.. so I would pull "bow to Nakata-sensei," and the kid with that slip would do the action. Everyone else would mark that kid off their bingo board and we all say "The person bowing to Nakata-sensei is ____." Whoever gets bingo first wins, but has to tell me each of the people's attributes in sentence form (tense notwithstanding). So, "The person bowing to Nakata-sensei is.... the boy reading a book is.... the girl playing a video game is.... " etc.

The Dutch auction is like something I played once at a camp. The "auctioneer" describes an item and then a representative from each group runs that item up, a point going to the first team to bring the correct kind of item. So, I would say "I want a book written by John Buchan," or "I want a pencil made in Japan." The trick should be more about recognizing the differences in similar items.. so I'm bringing in some little books I snagged for free from Tokyo orientation by different authors and giving every group a copy of each of several, so they can't just bring me any old book.. it has to be "written by..." or whatever. Some of them they can produce on the spot, like "I want a student's name written in cursive."

If you have a vote for which of these points is more important, or which of these games is more fun, let me know so I can lean toward that tomorrow morning.