For years, Honors English teacher Ms. Lange has incorporated a game she created called vocabulary basketball into her teaching schedule. At the end of each quarter, after the students have learned 50 vocabulary words, they get to play a review game that gets incredibly contentious (involving heated argument).

Vocab basketball is a team game so the room is divided into two sides; window versus door.  The winners get 5 extra credit points on the exam to add to the rivalry.

To start the game, Ms. Lange will read off a definition, and then two players must race to write the correct word that matches the definition with proper spelling. After a player answers correctly, they must race to pick up a ball (she uses dog squeaky balls), stand behind a designated “foul line” and shoot it into a bucket about 20 feet away. The goal is to make the ball into the bucket before your opponent does.

In vocab basketball, almost everything goes. You can block your opponent’s shot, and kick their ball away to slow them down. The game tends to get heated and competitive with teams yelling the incorrect spelling at the opposing player to throw them off.

The game is scored in a tally system. The team that has the most points once the list of words is completed is awarded five extra credit points on the vocab test. Vocab basketball is almost always played the day before the quiz as a fun way to practice.

Ms. Lange is a self-proclaimed vocab zealot (fanatic) about vocabulary and loves it when her students use it in their day-to-day lives. She always has a profusion (abundance) of interesting and useful words for her students to learn each week, doing her best to saturate the words into their minds with daily bell work and weekly complex sentences using the words. Students receive 100 words a semester – and 200 words a year.

Senior Zoe Forehand reminisces on the game by saying, “My team never won. It was athletic kids on one side and smart kids on the other. Things got very intense, but I enjoyed it.”

Another Senior, Montana Poe, says, “Our team was very competitive – it was Sirena, Maggie, and myself. We would snatch the ball, we were always the ones yelling and screaming, and most of all…we always won. The game helped me memorize words and many of them are engraved in my head.”

“It’s an interesting way to recap our vocabulary, I like how it’s interactive and I tend to take it way too seriously,” says current sophomore honors student Penelope Hermosillo-Elrod.

Ms. Langes’ sophomore honors class is favored by many and recommended to those who have a desire to pursue a higher English education. After finishing her class, many go on to AP Lang with Ms. Dara. Recently Ms. Dara began having her class play vocab basketball because her current students who came from Ms. Lange’s class recommended it. “It went well, but it got very intense. Both classes immediately played dirty, trying to sabotage the other team by kicking their ball far away or yelling incorrect information at their opponent about how to spell a word. But it was all good fun,” said Ms. Dara.