Create-your-own 4 Pics 1 Word (Voacb Review) Game with Pic Collage

...This activity is just a clever ruse to learn new vocabulary words.  

This year we’ve got the iPads on lock down aka they’re hooked to The Configurator aka WE choose the apps--so we’ve put on a limited number of educational games for the students to play. Whenever a kid gets downtime I see them playing the game ‘4 Pics 1 Word’.  They love it!  I’d go as far as saying that, for our students, playing ‘4 Pics 1 Word’ borders on obsession.

Imagine my excitement when one of our math teachers told us about an activity that she had created - 4 Pics 1 Word Vocab Review Game.  Brilliant!  She showed me the examples that she had created (see below) and her kids loved reviewing their vocabulary this way.  They worked collaboratively, as a class, to guess the words that went with the pictures that she projected on the whiteboard.

I thought about taking this game and turning it into a creation activity for students.  Having students find their own pics, to describe the new words that they’ve learned, increases the critical thinking that they’re doing about them.  This is going to help them increase their understanding of, and remember their meanings, better.  I knew this activity would fit well with Pic Collage, which is a fabulous app that our students love using in class.   I asked a few of our iPad Geniuses if they were interested in creating some of these Pic Collage-s, to review some of the vocabulary that they had recently learned in class, and they were psyched to do it! (See their examples below.)

If you’d like to increase the critical thinking even more, have students explain why they chose the pictures that they did. For example, for the Life Science vocab word ‘Nucleus’ below, “The nucleus is the boss of the cell so I chose a picture of Michael Scott, the boss on ‘The Office’” and “The nucleus is the control center and so I chose a picture of the control center in iOS7.”  Or, have students explain why they guessed the answers that they did.  Have them explain what they think the pictures are representing.  

(Balance)

(Slope)

(Y-intercept)

(Collaborate)

(Nucleus)