Using Sporcle to Build Vocabulary

My colleagues and I at The English House are all frequent  users of http://www.sporcle.com/. It's a quiz website with quizzes for just about everything you can imagine. I'm just going to wizz through a couple of them today and ideas on how to use them in your class. I normally use them as a warmer or cooler. Not to mention as a filler.
As I said before there are a plethora of quizzes on just about every subject under the sun. What's great is there are a whole bunch of vocabulary quizzes which can be really great in the classroom. I've used lots of general knowledge quizzes as a reward for good work on a number of occasions too.

The first pair of games I'm going to cover both involve the use of common suffixes. The Spanish favourite      -ation and the forever common -ish. The links are below.
http://www.sporcle.com/games/naqwerty3/sporclation-nation

http://www.sporcle.com/games/TheLoir/word-ends-in-ish

What I like to do with the words first is put them on the board and give the students 5 minutes to look up the meaning of any they don't understand on their phones.


Next I set the clock running and see how many they get right. I only take their first answer though to stop the multiple guessers I almost always have. The results were really surprising the last time I did these games and four of the words actually came up in the very same class.

That's about it for now. I'll be back tomorrow with more sporcleicious ideas. Tomorrow's is a fantastic way to practice reported speech. A great idea my colleague Neil gave me just yesterday.

I'll catch you on the morrow.

H