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SUBMITTED BY: Patrick Bickford / Alexander Rignanese / Mark Best / Luke O'Shannassy     BORROWED FROM / INSPIRED BY: An old Akita AJET website     EDITED BY: まだ

Uno

GRAMMAR: Time / Verbs (various tenses)     EXAMPLE: What time is it? / I dove into the pool.     DATE ADDED: Feb 07, 2008

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 15-30 min.
 
3 Votes: 5 Stars
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Brief Outline: Students enjoy playing Uno while practicing asking/telling the time.

 

Materials Needed:

  • UnoTime cards: Print out and make sets of the Uno time cards. A color printer is best but printing them out on a B&W printer and coloring them is also an exhausting option. Also, printing them out using a thick non-see-thru paper is best. If you don’t have access to that, either color one the other side of each card, make your own logo and print it on the backside of each card or double-layer each card. If you are really lazy, don’t do anything and have the students hide the ‘draw deck’ and the cards in their hands.
  • UnoVerb cards (submitted by Alexander Rignanese): For the cards, you'll need cardboard, glue and scissors. I glued each card to cardboard and then cut out the cards rather then buying several packs of cards and gluing them to the faces of the cards. The disadvantage to this option is that shuffling is difficult. Each card has a verb in a different tense, picture and simple example sentence. It is a big print out (almost 2Mb). There are 20 different verbs and each verb has four tenses, which means that there are 80 cards just for the verbs, not to mention the draw 1, 2, 4, skip and reverse cards. There's 144 cards in total, but you can choose whatever you want to print and use. NOTE: This Verb set has four types of verbs: present, past, present progressive, present perfect. If you use this for grade two students, take the present perfect cards out.
  • VerbTenseChart attachment (submitted by Mark Best): See Comments Area for details.

 

Detailed Explanation:

  1. Split the class into 4-6 groups. Each group receives a full set of Uno time cards.
  2. Each student is dealt 7 cards.
  3. Play Janken to see who starts first.

 

Variations:

  • There are varying ways to draw cards from the deck. If a student can’t play a card, OPTION #1 is to have them draw 1 card from the deck. If they can play it, so be it. OPTION #2 is to have the student keep drawing cards until they find one they can play. However, this could result in the discarded cards being reshuffled many times.

 Teaching Suggestions:

  • Review the Uno rules to ensure the students know them.
  • The target question for laying down a ‘Change’ or ‘Draw 4’ to all the students except for the one playing the card is: “What time is it?”
  • The target grammar of laying down Draw 1, 2 and 4’s is “Draw...”
  • The target grammar to change the color is “Change to...”
  • The target grammar for laying down every card is “It’s...”
  • If you're unsure about the rules, see Uno rules for details.

 

Cautions:

  • Sometimes when the students are having too much fun, they forget to speak English.

 

Comments:

  • (Oct 26, 2011) englipatrick (mod) said: @Ben, a volunteer fixed the error and I reloaded the worksheet.
  • (Oct 21, 2011) Ben said: Really good game, but a small complaint- that the analogue clock display on the 3:15 card is for 5:15. The students pointed this out no less than a hundred times. It takes a little bit of work to get all the cards cut out, laminated and then cut out from the laminated sheet again, but I think it is worth it, and the cards look great.
  • (June 20, 2011) Chonanbakuchozoku said: This looks really interesting!! Nice cards! I want to use the Uno Verb cards, but. . . How do you use English with these cards?
  • (June 7, 2011) Alex Rignanese said: hey all. hope my verb cards have helped with some second and third year classes. I thought I should mention one way to save a little time and effort that I've found. That is, rather than gluing the printout to cardboard and then cutting it out if you laminate the print outs then you don't need any cardboard. Usually if its for a class then it doesn't matter if you use a lot of laminating resources, and the cards will probably last forever (Though I haven't had any problems with my originals either).
  • (Nov 24, 2010) Englipedia said: @MarkBest, Received your attachment and posted it to the site.
  • (Nov 24, 2010) Mark Best said: Very nice UNO game (quality cards) I can tell you from experience (preps of place UNO with 36 JH 1st year students) that it can be made to work with bigger classes too (print and cut 8 sets of cards and split the class into groups of four or five - make sure you have no groups where no-one has played UNO before and spend 15 mins 'circulating' showing the relationship to 'regular UNO') I've made a verb chart with JP and English (intended to be blown up on the poster printer and used to support the 'verb tense UNO game' I'll send it in :-)
  • (Oct 28, 2010) Carlee Miller said: The students really loved this! It worked really well for a class of only 2 students and then the JTE and I played, too. Great for a super-small class. :)