The game that I designed is a “pass the ball” activity where students take turns verbally describing the events in the Calvin and Hobbes Exercise in my original activity using authentic materials. The entire comic strip will be on display at the front, and the students recite the events of each individual box in the comic. One person cites the events of only one box, must use past simple and/or progressive past correctly, and then pass the ball for someone else’s turn. The objective of this game is to solidify students’ ability to narrate plot events in a cohesive order and to use the past simple and progressive past structures correctly. It also continues students’ practice in translating visuals into words. Finally, when all students have had their turn, the teacher will briefly go over mistakes that were noted in students’ speaking and correct them. Depending on the size of the class, students can be limited to only one sentence or one event in a box before passing the ball to someone else. All students should get a turn.

Games like this are beneficial to include in the ESL classroom for several reasons: games can engage students by adding an element of fun, they do not come with the anxiety and penalization that quizzes and exams do, they do not require extensive planning and materials acquisition on the teacher’s part, and they can prepare students for formal assessments by allowing for mistakes to be made and corrected before they can affect students’ grades. Games can also serve as an informal opportunity for students to bond and create fun memories of the class. Finally, exciting activities such as games may enable better retention of taught material or corrected mistakes compared to a more mundane or standardized activity because exciting or unusual memories are more likely to be retained.