The Meaning of Beep Differentiation Tips and ELL Support

The Meaning of Beep is a game of context clues and synonyms. Emphasize the importance of synonyms with students so they’ll keep them in mind as they play. Here are some ideas for extra scaffolding:

• Prepare a Word Bank for students who find the game challenging.
• Have students watch the associated BrainPOP movie before playing The Meaning of Beep.  After they play, have them watch the movie again, taking note of words and sentences from the game. Then invite them to play one more time. 
• Review the sentences before students play, and prepare “Hint Cards” for more challenging sentences. Hints may include the following:
  • Part of speech of the missing word.
  • Different forms of the word to choose from (estimate, estimates, estimated, estimating, estimation)
• Encourage students to keep a list of words they don’t know while watching the movie. Provide time for them to look up meanings and synonyms of the words in a dictionary and/or thesaurus before playing The Meaning of Beep.
• Have students play in pairs as a single player to help each other, and to brainstorm potential words and synonyms together.
• Let students begin the game and play the first sentence of the round. Then stop them and ask what word they selected. If their word makes sense, encourage them to us a thesaurus or the Hints to identify synonyms. Having a list of synonyms in advance will help them play the next two sentences in the round. 
• Encourage students to click the audio symbol to hear the words spoken aloud. NOTE: The game is currently in beta and this feature is only functional  in Chrome and Safari.