Old Maid (Card Game) without the joker

There are a couple of different versions to this game. It is Old Maid without the joker.

Make sure the students have cut both the upper case and lower case letters in the back of their Let's Try 2 textbook. Have them write their names or class number on the back of their cards. Divide the students into groups of four. Have two students in each group use both the upper case and lower case letters from A~G. Everyone else in the group should put their cards away and clear their desks.

The two students with cards should have A~G uppercase letters (7 cards) and a~g lowercase letters (7 cards). Have the students mix their cards together for a deck total of 28 cards. Instruct the students to take out one card at random. (This will be the only card without a pair.) Distribute the deck evenly to every person in the group. Instruct the students to discard uppercase and lowercase pairs as they receive them Aa, Bb, Cc, etc. Finally they will end up with an assortment of nonmatching upper and lower case letters. From here play rock paper scissors to determine the order of play. For simplicities sake have the order of play go clockwise from the winner of rock paper scissors. Player 1 draws a card from the next player, if they receive a matching lower or uppercase letter, he/she should discard the pair. The first player to get rid off all of their cards is the winner. The person with the only remaining card left is the loser. The loser should be holding the upper/lower case match for the card that was pulled out at random before dealing the cards. If the kids are enjoying the game, have the shuffle and play again. This game is great for getting used to matching uppercase and lower case letters. You can have the students say the letter out loud when they find a pair for extra speaking practice. I chose A~G because a larger deck might take too long and get boring. Once the students get used to A~G, have them try with the letters H~N next.

This game can be adjusted for any vocabulary set. As long as you have two sets of the same vocabulary cards, you can have the students shuffle the cards into one deck and try to find pairs. This would also work well for Let's Try 2 Until 5 Do you have a pen? Unit 7 What do you want? and Let's Try 1 Unit 7 This is for you. In Unit 5 have the students ask "Do you have a ~?" and answer with "Yes, I do," or "No, I don't." If Unit 7, have the student who is getting a card pulled ask "What do you want?" and have the card puller as "I want a ~ please."

If you are savvy with photoshop and can find the correct paper, you could probably make a pretty convincing joker card and play the original game of Old Maid. However, I've always found that the students can easily identify the joker, so I started playing the version in which you take out a card instead.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.