Wheel Of Fortune!

Bring America’s favorite game show to your ESL classroom.

Skill Level: Beginning, Intermediate, Advanced; students must be able to read to play the game.

Materials Needed:
Deck of specially labeled cards.
Blackboard (to keep score).

Instructions:
I play the game with cards because I’ve not been able to make a wheel that’s easy to move and durable enough to withstand my students. If you can come up with a good wheel design, let me know!
Teacher prepares a deck of cards with the same sorts of labels as the wheel on Wheel Of Fortune–some have dollar amounts, some are “Bankrupt!” cards, and the rest given whatever special label you want (Lose A Turn, Pick Again, Sing A Song, etc.).

I’ve found the most success using a deck of 14 cards broken down like this: 4 $100 cards, 3 $150 cards, 2 $250 cards, 1 $500 card, 2 Bankrupt! cards, 1 Pick Again! card, 1 Lose a Turn! card.
The Teacher choses a sentence from the text and on the blackboard writes blank spaces for each letter in the sentence.
The game follows the rules of Wheel of Fortune. A Student picks a random card from the deck and, if she picked a money card, guesses a letter. If the letter occurs in the sentence, the student gets the amount of money on the card for each instance of the letter in the sentence. So if the sentence “This is a fun game” was written on the board, a student drawing a $100 card and guessing the letter “i” would get $200 for her team.

Helpful Hints:
Remember that the number 250 can mean “You’re stupid” in Chinese. Here in Northeast it does, I don’t know if it’s the same everywhere. My students all seem to enjoy getting a big laugh at the expense of whoever drew the $250 card, and no one seems to get their feelings hurt, but it’s just something you might want to be aware of.
Additionally, my students get a really big kick out of the idea that the value of the cards is in American Dollars, so you might want to play up the foreign currency aspect of the game.