In the first few days back after New Year’s, ETA Brianna Adu-Kyei hosted a few gentle review sessions to get everyone at SMA Muhammadiyah 1 Taman back into the English-thinking zone. But how to get her students to dust off all those fiddly last-unit concepts? Games, of course!

First, she played Mad Minutes, a competitive relay where two teams of students each had to rush to answer the question first (correctly!) and get every member of their team to go once before the other team could. The questions covered parts of speech, simple present tense, simple past, present and past continuous, possessive pronouns and adjectives, and a few softballs, like adverbs of frequency. Sometimes she even threw in a fast one, like the four elements of narrative text. But her very capable class handled them with flying colors.

When the students finished up a little early, Brianna offered a game of Hesitation—where, with each word, the next student had to quickly pick something either related or rhyming (so “boys” could lead to either “girls” or “toys”). In the end, even she herself was eliminated… (Who knew she’d blank on “shard”?) But honestly, Brianna could not be happier about it.

Brianna Adu-Kyei is currently teaching at SMA Muhammadiyah 1 Taman, Sidoarjo, East Java.