For Christmas, I led a competition between groups of 3–5 (preferably 4) students. I showed students several Christmas advertisements, but each time, I only showed a few seconds before pausing it. Then, I gave them four choices of companies that the advertisements could be from. So, I gave each group a couple of minutes to discuss amongst themselves what company they thought was correct, why they believed that, and what they thought would happen next. After sufficient time, each group shared their answers aloud. Then, I resumed each advertisement to reveal the correct answer and to see which groups guessed correctly. I kept a tally of scores to make the activity competitive between groups. I explained all of this to the students before beginning the competition so that everyone would know what we were doing. I had ten advertisements altogether. The first seven were from the following compilation video:
The last three advertisements were from another compilation video:
Obviously, some advertisements from these videos were left out of the activity. In my planning, I had to determine when to start and pause each video and when they each ended. Below are the timings:
Below is the slideshow of the four choices of companies for each advertisement. The slides of choices are in the same order as the advertisements:
My classes last 45 to 50 minutes. In most of my classes, we only finished eight advertisements before time ran out. At the end, I declared a winner based on which group had the most points. However, in a 60-minute class, it would be more possible to finish all ten advertisements. For my higher-level students, I only told them that they needed to state an agreed answer, explain why, and describe what they think would happen next; each person in the group should take a turn to speak on behalf of the group. For my lower-level students, I guided them more about the way in which they should declare their answers. For instance, I wrote on the board the following sentence with gaps: "We believe it is __________ because __________." That way, the students in each group could collectively create a sentence that states their guess and why by filling in the gaps.
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