9th Grade — Vocabulary & Concept Review Game Day

⏰ Do Now — Start Here

Without looking anything up, list as many vocabulary words from this semester as you can in 90 seconds.

🎯 Today's Big Question

How much of this semester's vocabulary and concepts can we recall and use?

📈 By the End of Today, You Will Be Able To

Recall and correctly define at least 15 vocabulary terms from across the semester.
Apply vocabulary in a game-based, low-stakes review setting.
Identify personal areas of strength and areas to review before the final portfolio unit.

🧰 What You'll Need

Index cards or a class set of the semester's vocabulary terms
Simple game materials (points board, timer, or team markers)

📋 Your Plan for Today

Day 1: Team Review Game

Do Now (5 min, above).
Mini-lesson (5 min): explain the game rules and team setup. Team review game, round 1 (25 min): teams compete to define and use vocabulary terms correctly.
Debrief (10 min): which terms tripped teams up the most?

Day 2: Review Game, Round 2 & Self-Check

Do Now (5 min): from yesterday's debrief, pick 2 terms you personally want to review. Team review game, round 2 (25 min): a second round covering the trickiest terms plus new ones.
Self-check (10 min): each student lists their 3 strongest and 3 weakest vocabulary areas going into the final portfolio unit.
Share (5 min).

🖨️ Print Your Handout

Word, picture, and definition for today's vocabulary, plus a place to write and draw. Available in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese.

Day 1: EN · ES · FR · AR · ZH
Day 2: EN · ES · FR · AR · ZH

🖥️ Today's Slide Deck

Short, on-the-board pacing slides — project these to follow along. (The full details are in the handout above, not here.)

Day 1

⬇️ Open / download this slide PDF

Day 2

⬇️ Open / download this slide PDF

📚 Key Words

Portfolio: A curated collection of a designer's best work used to show skills to others.

✅ What Your Finished Work Should Include

Participation + self-check list reviewed; no formal grade -- this is a low-stakes review day.

Exit Ticket: Name your 2 strongest vocabulary terms from this semester and 1 you still want to review.

📊 Before You Leave

Quick, anonymous class check-in -- takes less than a minute.

Class Check-In

📤 How You Submit This — For Credit

Your physical projects don't stay in the classroom past the day you finish them -- you're responsible for your own completed work, the same way you'd be responsible for it in any job. The one exception is your class notebook: it has its own designated spot in the room (ask your teacher exactly where), and most students leave it there day to day -- but it's yours, so if you'd rather keep it with you or bring it home to study from, that's your call. Either way, always know where your own notebook actually is. Before a finished physical piece leaves your hands for good: ask your teacher for one of the classroom cameras, photograph your finished (or in-progress) work, then plug that camera's SD card into a classroom computer and upload the photo into your portfolio folder. That uploaded photo, with a short caption, IS your submission for credit -- the photo is what gets kept and graded, not the physical piece.

📁 Portfolio Update — Once a Week

Once a week (e.g. every Friday, or your class's last meeting of the week), photograph or save your best finished or in-progress piece from that week into your portfolio folder (a physical folder for now, or a Google Drive folder once one is set up) with a 1-2 sentence caption: what it is, and one skill it shows. In Grade 10 this becomes your Google Sites portfolio -- keep adding to it weekly from here on so you're not trying to reconstruct a whole semester of work at the end.

✍️ Example description for your Google Sites portfolio (fill in YOUR blanks -- don't just copy this):

For this piece, I made ______________ (name what you made) for “Vocabulary & Concept Review Game Day.” This project asked: “How much of this semester's vocabulary and concepts can we recall and use?” I used Portfolio by ______________ (explain how you used it in THIS piece). The hardest part was ______________, and I solved it by ______________. I'm proud of ______________ because ______________.

🎓 ACP Exam Prep

This lesson connects to the Photoshop Adobe Certified Professional exam: Domain 1: Working in the Design Industry

🔗 Want to Learn More?

No extra links for this lesson.

🚀 The Extra Mile

Cross-Class Connection: The same active-recall study technique that works for a Regents exam or vocabulary quiz in any subject.

Career Connection: Fluent design vocabulary is directly tested on the ACP exam that every career track on this site references.

Go further -- turn this into a portfolio piece:

Design the actual review game itself (cards, board, or digital slides) as a real, reusable study tool for next semester's class. Start here: pick the game format — cards, board, or slides — and write out just ten questions or terms in plain text before you design a single card.
Build a one-page illustrated glossary of your ten hardest vocabulary words, useful as real study material for a friend. Start here: pull your actual ten hardest words from your own notes, not a random list, before you sketch a single icon.