This article will guide you through a technique that has worked its wonders to help me as a teacher, when initiating a new topic or revisiting an old one with a student. The students are superbly engaged and it may help you wade through the awkwardness of starting or revising a topic or task .We will call this drill ‘creating a word cloud’, where we pick a subject and let the students pick any specific word, to start a vocabulary list of other words- all related to the parent word again suggested by the students.

If your students are in primary school, the game version can just be about spouting random words connected only to the last alphabet of the previous word. For example- If the first word of the game is “egg”, the next word could be “gate” and the word after that could be “elephant”- here we are connecting the last alphabet of the previous word to the first alphabet of the next word. You can choose to divide your class into two groups and have them continue the word loop in turns. You can keep a score card and give them no more than five seconds to suggest a word, and voila! –you have the perfect word game!

Another advanced way of playing the same technique would be through association. Let us take the same example- ‘egg’- the connection to this word could be the word ‘breakfast’, which connects to a broader one such as ‘newspaper’, as I could be reading a paper while having my breakfast, then, ‘newspaper’ could be associated to the word ‘tree’-the source of the material paper, which could finally be connected to terms such as ‘environment’ and/or ‘sustainability’.

Irrespective of what grades and subjects you are teaching; this is a great way to ease into a topic or theme, and, just practice learning newer words related to a specific idea, or just revise a difficult concept. The next time you’re running out of ideas, lean on to this technique and see your classroom come alive!