Agadir ELT Inspectorate 2014

1. Dear all,
I hereby share my school Scrabble club creation experience, and I hope it’ll be useful to you all.
Hopefully, you’ll all create clubs in your schools so we can organize local, regional or why not
national contests. As for this manual, I tried to make it as concise as possible, and feel free to contact
me for further information.
Step 1: I talked to my students about the game and told them that we were going to create a club in
our school. I also invited other colleagues to spread the word among their students.
Step2: I wrote a request to the headmaster telling him about the creation of the club. This is just a
formality but it’s necessary for the administration.
Step3: Choose a day that’s suitable both for you and for the students. I chose Friday afternoons from
3-5 because all the students are free in our school.
Step 4: On the day of the first session, bring in your laptop, a video projector (data show) and a
Scrabble game board (it costs about 100 Dhs). You start by using a game application on your laptop so
the whole audience gets an idea about the game before they play it on the board.
(you’ll have the PC game application attached to this doc).
Step 5: Make sure you have many boards on that day. If you can’t afford that, then you make good
use of the one you have by having students seated around a large table, or a group of tables and then
you put the board in the middle so everyone can see. If you don’t know the rules of the game yet, then

2. it’s advisable to do that by visiting this link. As for me, I brought my own board and did the
demonstration using it, and then I asked the students to collect some money to buy other boards.
This is how the lay out may look like. If you have small tables like me, then the other students can
stand up and watch the demonstration.
Step 6: There are two types of this game: Classic and Duplicate.
Classic is about competition. It’s the most famous form of the game in which two to four players play
against each other and the winner is the one who gets the best score at the end of the game. It depends
on three things: accurate vocabulary, tactics (where to put the word so it brings a big score) and chance
(everyone picks up 7 letters randomly). The Duplicate form of the game is a bit different: you are the
referee; you decide which letters to use, so the factor of luck is eliminated.
I tried the two forms and the best according to my experience and the one which educators advise is
the Duplicate because you can use it to revise some vocabulary items related to the units students
study at school.
Step 7: The students will like the classic because it’s more competition-oriented and you know the
kids they like competition and scores ;) so no harm if you devote the first three sessions to the classic
scrabble because this will enable the students to know the rules and to get hooked, and that’s what we
want! The two forms have the same principles, but you need more boards to play Duplicate because
every player or team needs one board contrary to classic in which four players can compete on the
same board.

3. The first session of scrabble classic. As you see the students managed to form some nice words!
Of course, you gotta be patient with your students! They take time to learn the game and to learn to
organize themselves.

4. Step 8: For the scrabble classic, you just make teams according to the number of boards and students
you have and you watch the game while being there to correct or settle any dispute. It’s better to have
a dictionary so anytime there’s a problem, you ask students to check their dictionaries!
As for the scrabble duplicate, you decide which field you’re going to tackle on that day. Then you
make a list of the voc items you want your students to revise.
For example, I chose the field of Health and welfare as it’s a unit I was teaching at that time.
First, the students put all the letters alphabetically on the table or on the game pack (like the picture
below).
I chose to start with the word “stomach”.
So, since the first word is STOMACH, I shuffle the letters so they become something unknown to the
students and then I announce the letters they should pick up. They are M.A.T.S.O.C.H which is an
anagram of stomach. They all draw the same letters and try to find a meaningful word. The good thing
about the scrabble duplicate is that all students should take the same letters and so nobody will blame
his luck! After, you tell them to find the longest meaningful word possible which is related to health
and to place it on the board so it brings them a big score. Then you give students 3 minutes and when
the time’s over, you look at the boards and see who found the word and how much points they got.
You give everyone their score but all the players put the highest word (the winning word) on their
boards, and so on and so forth until you finish the game.

5. Here’s the example of the word DOCTOR:
Here’s the final result of my students

6. Every board should be the same because every player puts on only the winning word be it his or other
people’s, but gets his score. For example, student A gets the right word: stomach but puts it on the
board and it brought him 19 pts, another got only 10, but the winner got 30. So everyone takes his
points and they all draw the winning word.
At the end, your students will learn or revise many voc items.
The idea is to get them to like to play the game because it demands accurate vocabulary which
demands reading. And since most our students are not interested in reading, this game may motivate
them to be so especially in this age of information and technology where students care about
everything but how to write a word. Also, in our society, most of the games we play are physical or
demand little mental efforts. Thanks to this game, we could get our students accustomed to mental or
intellectual games so that this game becomes a culture, and not just a pastime!
For more photos and interaction, like our page on Facebook. It’s the official page of an association I’m
the co-founder of, but I use it now to post the activities of the scrabble club. Or contact me via email at
solenzaro@gmail.com.
I’m also ready to help you create your school scrabble club by any means I can afford.
Good luck!
Lahoucine Azergui
High school teacher
Alkhalij High School, Anza
Agadir