Weekday Card Collector
From Mie Guidebook
Time
10-20 min
Materials
Make weekday cards. Each card has one of the days of the week written in English and Katakana on it (but NOT in Japanese). Make enough cards so that each student can get 4 of the 7 days of the week.
- Optional: To make the cards extra interesting, I made the cards have pictures of the planet associated with that particular day of the week. Be sure to laminate the cards if you want to use them more than once.
- Sunday: The Sun
- Monday: The Moon
- Tuesday: Mars
- Wednesday: Mercury
- Thursday: Jupiter
- Friday: Venus
- Saturday: Saturn
Directions
- Teach the students the 7 days of the week. Be sure to write down the Kanji for that day followed by their English pronunciation on the board in katakana (if the students are supposed to know romaji, write it down in both romaji and katakana or just romaji depending on their proficiency with English).
- Give each student 3 cards. Make sure no student has more than one of the same card.
- The goal of the game is to collect all 7 days of the week.
- To get cards a player does not already have, they must go to any other player in the class and do rock/paper/scissors. The winner then names one card (day of the week) that they are missing. The other player then shows his cards and must give up the requested card IF he/she has it.
- If at any time a student gets all 7 days of the week, they turn the cards over to the teacher and that student wins.
- If at any time a student runs out of cards, they may go to the teacher for one more day of the week card.
Variations
- This is good for active listening skills but more complicated: To get cards a player does not already have, they must go to any other player in the class and do rock/paper/scissors. The winner then names one card (day of the week) that they are missing. If the losing player has the requested card, he must give it over; if not, he/she gets to request a card from the winning player in turn. If both players do not have the requested cards, they move on to the next player. If your students are dishonest, make sure they show each other their cards before they part ways. This is different than the previous version in that it both speeds up the game and forces one player to ask for a day of a week and the other to listen to what card they must give up (should they have it).
Notes
- It should go without saying that players must request days of the week in English, not Japanese. Even if they can't remember the days of the week or the pronunciation, they should be able to simply look at the chalkboard for a translation. The beautiful part of this game however is that after a while, even students who did not listen to or understand what you taught eventually will no longer have to look at the chalkboard to learn the names of the days of the week in English.
- The Japanese kanji for the days of the week each are associated with an element and a planet. In English, the days of the week are named after gods that are associated with the same elements and planets as in Japanese. As a result, the names of many planets and the days of the week are derived from the same meaning in both Japanese and English. Both Japanese and English planets and days of the week have their roots in Babylon, a long extinct community of people who were pioneers of astronomy and math.
