Turn a Writing Strategy into a Game

So many of our high school students have trouble writing constructed responses and yet they are expected to generate them in most classes.  For this reason, we find the RACE strategy (restate the question, answer the question, cite the evidence, explain the evidence) to be extremely effective in supporting our students’ abilities to incorporate all aspects of a comprehensive response paragraph. However, we found our students to really struggle with restating the question (a skill that we assumed had been previously acquired). This prompted us to create extra practice to help our students use part of the question and turn it into their sentence starter when responding to wh- questions.  

We decided to turn this part of the RACE strategy into a game to increase engagement and motivation within sessions, and let us just say – our high school students LOVED it! It was a fun way to bring an element of competition to the session. What’s better than a fun game that will highlight your student’s competitive nature all while targeting their speech and language goals?

Our “Restate the Question” game provides almost 100 practice questions. This means almost 100 opportunities for your students to practice restating questions into their sentence starter! The cards contain questions they would likely see in an academic class. 

How to play

Students will take turns picking a card. On their turn, the player will turn over the card and restate the question for their chosen card on their answer sheet (or all students can restate all cards for more practice and just not receive the points). Students are not required to answer the actual question, but they are required to restate the question and turn it into a sentence starter for their answer. If the player gets it right, they will receive the number of points based on the pattern on their card.

The student who earns the most points by the end of the session/class period will win. You can also choose a desired point value and the first person to earn that number of points wins.

Our students have LOVED playing this game during our sessions and they get super competitive. Check out this fun new resource here!