Last year, I attended a workshop put on by the French Consulate entitled “Gamifying the French Classroom.” It was interesting but not as practical as I would have liked–most of the games were for purchase or required software I don’t have.

Ever since attending that workshop last April, I’ve been trying to think of how to bring more of a gamified feel to my projects and units. Students respond well to Quizlet Live, Kahoot, and Jeopardy! in my classroom, so why not make learning more entertaining and ultimately more engaging? After reading Amanda’s blog in the fall about her final exam review passport (and also attending her group’s Grab-and-Go PD session last month), I felt compelled to rethink my finals review as we wind down the year and make the push towards exam week.

Let me back up a few steps first. For the final unit of the year in French 3, I’ve decided to modify the traditional food unit and teach students about food trucks, regional French cuisine, and the food truck culture in Paris which I experienced firsthand over the past three summers working in Paris.

I called my unit “The Great Food Truck Race.” To determine their groups for this final unit and project, students selected from random cards I made with French regions written on them. Earlier this week, they researched their assigned regions, local cuisine, and points of interest. From there, each group designed an origial food truck and a logo after learning about their regional cuisine. I think they’ve been having fun with the project-based learning aspects of this unit, but I wanted to tap into the “race” aspect of this unit as we make our way to finals week.

And that’s when it struck me. Instead of doing a “finals review” week or a few random days here and there, why not design an entire unit around a series of review activities?

The idea is simple: each week, I am hosting a series of competitions that really aren’t much different from the typical language exercises, activities, and worksheets we’ve been working on all year. The only difference is how I’m framing these competitions.

I’ve set up a Google Spreadsheet that the students have access to in order to keep a running tally of how many points they score during each competition which constitutes the ongoing “food truck race.” By the end of these next three weeks, the group with the most amount of points will earn a small bonus on the final exam. I introduced the rules earlier this week and the excitement which greeted my announcement was unlike anything I’ve seen all year. You would have thought I’d told them they could be on their phones every class from here on out…

The “competitions” include the following activities (along with several more I’m still mentally figuring out):

• The Price is Right game in French to review food words, quantities, and numbers
• A Jeopardy! review of food vocab from French 1-2
• An upcoming quiz on the conditional mood we covered during the fall semester (which I’ll let them take in partners and score purely for race points and not for the overall grade)
• Subjunctive verb conjugation speed races to review material from two units ago
• Instagram challenges in which I’ll assign a task and judge the videos based on creativity and use of language
• Speaking quizzes (formerly known as “oral exams”)
• And then more traditional assignments for this current food truck unit such as creating a realistic menu, hosting an “interview” with a local journalist and their food truck, writing up an in-class business proposal without the assistance of Google Translate or a French-English dictionary, researching French outdoor games and proposing a special Happy Hour with games of their choosing, and so forth.

After only two in-class competitions, I’m already seeing more participation and engagement than I’ve seen in past classes. I hope the momentum continues into the remaining weeks, but so far it’s been fun to teach and keeps me on my toes in terms of thinking about how to make each review session more successful, engaging, and fun!

And best of all, I’m tricking my students into studying and fully participating in French.

For now, I leave you with some of their initial food truck designs as their posts are trickling in all weekend.