Percenteage Cards: Explanation

Percentage Cards

• Details

Name of Item	Percentage Cards
Activity Type	Game / Warmer
Student Level	Lower Intermediate - Upper Intermediate
Time Allowance	10 - 15 minutes
Preparation Required	Copying worksheet onto card and cutting out individual cards - 10 minutes per set.
Other Items Needed	Scissors / copier-friendly card
Vocabulary	Nothing special
Grammar	Sentence patterns concerning percentages

• Instructions

In this game it's best for each pair of students to have a set of cards, so initial preparation could be quite time consuming. However, once they are made, you can use them again and again with other classes. You may want to try this out with one of your smaller groups first, though.

Before they can start the game, students need to be introduced to one or two question patterns for asking about percentages. You could do this by writing jumbled or gapped sentences on the black-board / white-board and elicitting answers. Suitable patterns might be:

What percentage of people live in cities?
What percentage of this class is present today?
What percentage of your body is made up of water?

Once they are quite happy about these, it's time to move on to the game. The easiest way to explain the game is to demonstrate with the help of one of your stronger students. The procedure is as follows:

In pairs (or maybe threes), one student takes a card and hides it from the partner. The student with the card then asks the other student questions to try to make her / him say the percentage on the card (i.e. he / she is trying to elicit the percentage on the card). Once everybody has understood what they have to do, the various pairs can proceed through their pack of 15 cards. If you want to make it a little easier, you can write up the complete list of 15 percentages listed on the cards so that the person guessing knows the range of possibilities she / he has to choose from. If you want to add a competitive element, you could make it a race to see which partnership can finish first.