"What club do you want to join?" Postman Game

So with the school year ending, I thought using the clubs and teams vocab to help sixth grade students actually see who they may be in a club with next year would be fun! We used it to teach "What club do you want to join?" & get the kids thinking about what English words they know, but the real goal was to have fun and make a memory before they graduate.

Explanation: First, teach / review this question and answer set. Doing a few examples and call and response is good.

"What club do you want to join in junior high school?"
'I want to join the ____ club / team."

Grouping up (five minutes)

Explain that they are to stand up and hunt for real potential members of their club and cluster together for five minutes by asking this question in English. Usually they end up wandering the room together or even linking arms and you can tell when the clusters have formed. If your JTE isn't oppossed to the idea, letting the "going home club" kids join together is fine for this activity! Those are the ones not planning to join a club. Additionally, if students have no friends joining their club, have all partnerless students join together as the loners club. (they called themselves this, not me XD)

Tip: this may be a hard activity to run without speaking Japanese or a lot of JTE support, but if you can hear the word "kitaku" or "kitaku-bu" being said excitedly, thats the going-home club. They may need to have you write "going home club" on the blackboard as we didn't have it in the textbook. [obviously]

Once the groups are made, ask their club/team, and have them sit down together. Everyone should have a groupmate, even if they're a pair or in the loner gang.

Game! (Ten minutes)

First, explain the basic rules of postman. This is a game where the whole class thinks about words that can be made out of another word: the two examples I know are "postman" and "teacher," each of which I've seen middle schoolers make a dozen plus words out of. There are surely other juicy ones, feel free to try your own! 'Creatures' may be good. The twist here is that every club can use that word in addition to their club name! Basketball team can use "b a s k e t b a l l" in addition to your word, cooking club can use "c o o k i n g" etcetera. Because the loners club didn't get to meet any friends in their club, I let them go wild by mixing all of the names of their clubs into the activity allowing them pretty limitless English creativity. Judo, swimming, anime... the world is their oyster.

Five minutes did not seem like enough, so I recommend letting their brains go wild for like ten minutes before asking everyone to present what words they thought of. Encourage having a scribe who keeps track of all the words either on their tablets or blank sheets of paper. Keep an eye on the smaller groups to be sure they're having fun, one or two ideas from the teacher may get their cogs turning. I had concerns about how many words sixth graders would really know, but in groups and with a bonus word, they did a great job seeing possibilities!

The game ends with you asing each group to present their words to the class!

I noticed everyone was extra buddy-buddy afterwards and the clubmates even did some acitivites together. It felt like a wonderful relaxing wrapup and easy way to help them process their transition in April. Its my first time posting, so please let me know in the comments if I forgot to explain something essential to understanding how to run this.