Typhoon Pirates

GRAMMAR: General Game     SUBMITTED BY: Stuart Fance     BORROWED FROM / INSPIRED BY: Englipedia's T&T / Typhoon Games     DATE ADDED: Feb 14, 2011     EDITED BY: まだ

ÒÓÔÕ    èé   20-50 min.   6 votes: 4.5-star If you're going to give this activity a low-rating, please post a useful comment to help make it better. SearchJHSActivity

Materials Needed:

• TyphoonPirates attachments: The attachments include Score Cards & Scoring Pieces. To prepare the Score Cards after printing them out (in colour if possible), cut out the twenty cards and stick each one onto the middle of a stiff piece of card.

Detailed Explanation:

1. On the blackboard, arrange the Score Cards face down in a 4x5 grid: (A,B,C,D) x (1,2,3,4,5).
2. Students select a card by calling out the co-ordinates (e.g. "A2" / "C5" etc); the teacher turns over the card to reveal the number of points awarded to that student/team.
   The score scheme is follows:
• Cannon Ball: 1 point.
• Parrot: 2 points.
• Treasure Chest: 3 points.
• Shark - 0 points.
• Pirate Ship: The team that selects this card can 'steal' all the points from another team.
• Typhoon: All points are wiped out from all teams.
3. If a team chooses a Pirate Ship, but none of the teams has any points to steal, they can keep the card (just stick it to the board next to their team name/number) and use it later.
4. Sometimes it is a good idea to have one (high-scoring) card in reserve; if, at the end, the game is tied, you can have a final tie-break question.

Variations:

• You can assign different points to the cards, for example: 5, 10, 15 / 50, 100, 200 etc.
• Having 20 cards usually takes about 40-45 minutes to work through. For a longer/shorter game, adjust the number of Score Cards accordingly.
• I found that the ratio of different Score Cards on the attached sheet worked well, but you can also adjust these accordingly, for example, having 15 cannon balls and just one of each other card, etc.
• To bolster excitement, you can start each team off with 1-10 points each.
• If you have time, you can print and cut out the attached Typhoon Game Scoring Pieces and use them to keep track of the scores.

Teaching Suggestions:

• Run through the scoring system with the students before you start your game.
• Do a demonstration of the PIrate Ship 'stealing' points and the Typhoon wiping out all the points.
• I used this with a comparative quiz ("Which is longer, The Nile or The Amazon?" etc) with the students divided into teams, but you could use it for any team game which requires a scoring system.

Tips/Cautions:

• Try to get the students to select their card by saying the co-ordinates in English rather than Japanese (most of my students were getting over-excited and saying "A no ichi" etc).