SPECIAL! For this era of of remote learning!

For these Zoom times, I’ve reconfigured Capture to work on a shared screen. You can cultivate some of the suspense and glee of “swapping” words without touching physical cards.

My original Capture game post gives you the rationale and procedure for the game I invented with word cards. I’m assuming that even an amateurish video is worth a thousand words, so I’m not going to try to explain the revamped procedure on Zoom.

But I will give you a few tips about setting up the Googledoc which you’ll share on Zoom. Start by creating a table with two cells. Into the lefthand cell, insert a 3×4 table. This will be where you type a word in one color and then highlight it in the same color, effectively making a solid color brick.* In the right hand cell, insert a 1×1 table with your name and your opponent’s name in separate columns. This will serve as the workspace for capturing and returning words as well as the final score sheet when you have uncovered all the words.

* Pick a color for the text using the    tab. Pick the same color for highlighting using the    tab.

The words I used with Elias in the video were from 3 categories:

• u–e : exclude, useful, costume, rudely, refuse
• o–e: soapstone, backbone, flagpole, homemade
• i–e : firefly, reptile, pinecone (captures both the i–e words and the o–e ones!)

One thing I love about this game is that it’s so adaptable. With older kids you can do adjectives that end in -ful, -less, -ive, and -ous, or “families” of vocabulary words: seeing words like glance, gaze, peer vs. eating words like devour, gorge, etc. Even fourth graders enjoy the fast action and the surprise element of seeing where the words land at the end of the game.