Keyword Poker - Revision

I do despair at the phony academic listening paper on the GCSE music courses. We use AQA at our school as the exam carries little weight (only 20%).  I actually prefer the Edexcel paper which requires proper appraisal of music to an extent but then being content bound by the set works and the greater weighting of the exams has led us to stick with AQA.


We focus (and rightly so in my opinion) on getting the students really good scores on their coursework or controlled assessment or whatever you want to call them, and then the exam can take care of itself with less pressure. This has been successful in the past so fingers crossed for this year again.


In the run up to the exam season I thought I would share a revision technique that I use for music but is easily transferable to other subjects.

Keyword Poker - (You can now download the cards here)


Yes I really do despair that the curriculum for the AQA GCSE is basically a list of keywords but here is doing some pretty intense revision.


I have a pack of cards where the areas of study correspond to the suits so for example Texture & Melody would be the equivalent of hearts. Each card has a keyword or a number of keywords printed in the middle, the first letter of each keyword corresponding to the numbers on proper cards. So for example you could hold a card onto which is printed:

Texture & Melody

Polyphonic/Contrapuntal

This card could either be played as a P or C of Texture & Melody, like a 5 of hearts.  I have multiple words on their to allow for more combinations of letters to make the game flow faster (more on the way we play in a bit). There is also the sheer number of words that kids need to remember which would mean a deck of a hundred or so cards as well as there being some duplicity in some of the words where they have the same meaning or are closely related.




We play As are high, so a pair of Bs (i.e. Bitonal and Blue notes) is stronger than a pair of Cs (i.e. Crescendo and Canonic). After that it basically follows the ranking system in Poker so a flush is obtained by getting five cards from the same area of study and a straight is made by getting cards with subsequent letters from the alphabet i.e. (Leitmotif, Monophonic, Natural Minor, Ostinato, Pianissimo)


We play Texas hold 'em rules and use Haribo (other jelly sweets are available but why would you?) as our currency.


To play a hand students must be able to define every key word that they are using, ideally musically and using their instrument or their voice. After each hand, we look at cards they did not play because they were uncertain of the definition; you can bet the next time that card comes up the students are able to define it.


Hope you find this useful in some way. Could the areas of study be Science modules with key terms or different acts from a play and important words or characters? The biggest issue I have is getting the kids not to eat their money before the end of the game.