Thinking of those children who just froze with our request to write about themselves, we sincerely felt the importance to grow their writing and language proficiencies. And so we prepared a few word games that children can play together at out visitation this time.
The 1st game is a game where a player says a word starting with the last syllable of the word given by the previous player. In English we could play this game by taking the last letter: Apple – Elephant – Tiger – Ring… but in Cambodian, since its uniqueness of the language, the last word not a letter is passed on to the next. For example
កែវទឹក (glass of water) - ទឹកក្រូច (orange) - ក្រូចឆ្មារ (lime)
And in addition, not only a noun but a phrase which consists more than 2 syllables also often came out as an answer. For example ញ៉ាំបាយ (eat rice).
The 2nd game is a word association game. A player says a word which relates to the previous word or which he/she imagines from the previous word. For example, Red – Apple – Sweet – Sugar – Ant - Small…
The 3rd game is to find proverbs which start with a certain letter among Cambodian alphabet. Cambodian alphabet is listed as ក・គ・ខ・ឃ… And so if in the case of the fist letter ក, children will answer like កុំស្លាប់ដូច ពស់កុំរស់ដូចកង្កែប (Don’t die like a snake, don’t live like a frog.)
While we played together, children were thinking hard to find appropriate vocabularies and proverbs. What is even better was that teachers were also observing how we were playing. It would be great if this kind of games can be taken into children’s daily life or in a classroom to nurture their language ability and knowledge.
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