Words are Foam Bullets: How to Make Vocab Lessons More Fun with a Roast
Are you speechless at your second grade students’ ingenuity and dying from laughing so hard? Vocab to learn? Stage a roast. Get those kids dissing like their lives depend on it — like rappers do. No need for actual rhyming.
There’s no greater joy than hearing students quickly and confidently use their new English vocabulary words naturally and repeatedly. Such eagerness really makes the time and energy we spend preparing lessons worth it. I’ve been fortunate to teach some outrageously bright, innovative and vivacious ESL students in S. Korea who seem to inhale new vocabulary words like movie viewers inhale popcorn.
They’re fascinated by subtle differences in meaning. They’re tickled by how unique words roll off their tongues. They really allow their individual affinity for certain words to wash over them. It’s beautiful to watch lightbulbs pop on above students’ heads as they realize all the impactful ways they’re going to be able to use one single new word in the future.
So how do we get kids really excited about learning new vocabulary?
According to “The Maeve Chronicles” by Elizabeth Cunningham, having a go at your mates and your enemies alike is a Celtic national pastime. When I was in 5th grade, my friends and I came up with a list of Yo Momma jokes longer than our arms. We were endlessly entertained by that list.
Everyone needs to learn how to properly “insult” someone because a sense of humor makes the world go round.
None of us are slaving away at learning a second language so we can sound serious and intellectual all the time. A dose of good, healthy sarcasm creates depth in all close personal relationships.
The practice of organized verbal sparring early on builds character. It is the foundation of freestyle rap. It works similar to a break dance battle. It’s never about whoever we’re dishing it out to and always about our own creativity and expression.
Each round is ideally just caustic enough to have the next participant biting at the bit to return the jest and gentle enough that the understanding that it’s just a game is never lost.
It’s an intricate exploration of personal boundaries, knowing when it would be welcome to up the ante and knowing when to pull back when we’re about to go to far. Students who are close friends naturally take shots at each other. It is beneficial and enlivening to the energy of the classroom when the kids in question are very aware of each other’s boundaries and what falls in the safe zone for what they can say to each other.
For some though, exactly where that line is changes daily depending on their mood and the volatility of their friendships. Additionally, not all classes are going to be full of close friends or students who are comfortable with this kind of banter. Sometimes it’s best to redirect this energy to steadier seas.
This is where Glow, or your character of choice, comes in. Glow the dinosaur, my glorious alter ego, serves as an outlet to give students somebody neutral to diss and push around, providing them an “ego boost” as they prevail through their lessons.
The chance to back talk Glow works on kids like a shot of espresso works on teachers. Glow is petty and vain. I use a special obnoxious voice to indicate that Glow is talking. She spends most of her time loafing around and sighing petulantly.
If I ever need to rouse students into an impassioned response to pretty much anything, I let Glow “teach” for awhile. Everything she says ends with one of the following: “because I’m so pretty,” “because I’m so smart,” “because I’m sooo perfect.” The more indulgently arrogant, the better.
For most, there are few things more inflaming than letting shameless vanity go unaddressed. Before long, the kids are countering with how “ugly” and “stupid” Glow is and tearing through their vocabulary word lists for more fodder to articulately put her back in her place.
Glow’s swagger deteriorates into a simple, meaningful “NO! Noooooo!!! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” followed a barrage of flustered sighing, which seems to work like jackpot bells on students while unanimously indulging any unspoken resistance we all may be experiencing to pretty much anything in life.
In a Glow-centric classroom, eventually her signature protest of “NO!” starts to actually mean “YES!” Kids look forward to vocabulary time because it means they will learn new words to roast or kill Glow with and earn an instance of her indignant, ruffled screaming at them.
Students often write vocabulary sentence assignments full of winning Glow insults for homework and earn a Glow comic:
Death is so serious that it’s constantly funny: the rule in my classroom is you can only make jokes about your own death and not anybody else’s, except for Glow’s because being a doll, she’s already dead.
It got to the point where during vocabulary practice, students would compete against each other to use every word and description under the sun to most artfully dispatch Glow in the most colorful way possible. This led to a whole bunch of run on sentences, but they were so in their flow that I had to throw my hands up in surrender and just make them promise that they would consider a well placed period when it came time to write.
These kids were pulling out full blown stories composed off the top of their heads in the moment when all I asked for was a sentence. It was positively spectacular, considering they were using four or five new vocabulary words at a time correctly! This is the true spirit of improv and performance and the fact that this was all happening in an ESL classroom in South Korea speaks volumes of the brilliance of the youth in this country.
Here are some of my favorites (new vocabulary words in bold):
“Glow was ambling along the side of a volcano when a substantial gust of wind blew off her toupee and she tried to scamper fast to catch it but she fell into the volcano and died.”
“Glow was snoozing in her house when she heard an alarming noise and her heart pulsated. She hurtled outside to see the noise. There was a mirror outside and Glow was so flabbergasted when she saw her ugly face in the mirror that she became unconscious and died.”
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