This activity is essentially a Christmas-themed reskin of TakoyakiTacos' KARAAGE CATCH game. I used it in elementary grades 4～6 but I think that JHS would enjoy it also. It was a little difficult for some of the younger classes to get through many questions, but by starting with a practice round and demonstrating how it works they understood it.
There are enough slides prepared for up to 2 games of 12 rounds, plus a practice round in the first one. None of my classes ever even finished a whole game, so this should be more than enough.
TakoyakiTacos suggested two different ways of playing and while I was using it for elementary I opted to use the JHS method as I feel that it works better. I recommend checking the original Karaage Catch listing to better understand how this works!
How to play
- Split students into groups and give them a whiteboard and pen.
- Show students the question on the slide and have them write down the answer. I suggest a time limit for each question, a base of 1 minute is a good start, then adjust to 30s or 2m depending on the difficulty of the question.
- Once all groups have presented an answer you can then let the groups pick a pair of hands (1-4)
- Play the falling items animation and update the students scores accordingly.
- Team with the most points wins.
You will need to prepare your own questions. On this version there's no specific visuals relating to questions, but in other versions I have added some. I might update this listing and add these versions sometime! Let me know if that's something you'd want.
As TakoyakiTacos mentions in his post, it's a good idea to have the teams start with 5 points so that they don't go negative. Be prepared for some tragic points swapping near the end of the game too.