A tool (game) to practice vocabulary and grammar: Connections

Recently, I have become dangerously obsessed with a new game "created" by The New York Times: Connections. Wyna Liu, creator and editor of Connections says she was inspired by cartoonist Robert Leighton, and not by the BBC gameshow Only Connect, although the similarities are plenty.

Anyway, I had no idea about the existence of the BBC gameshow, and since the Wordle acquisition I have been accessing the NYT Games quite frequently, and even more since Connections arrived about a year ago now. It was just a month later that the user and designer Swellgarfo created in just a couple of hours a free archive of all NYT Connections and a way to create your own Connections.

I did not discover this masterpiece until a few weeks ago and since then I have been using it to create Connections for my family and friends. I have also been using it in my Spanish lessons and it works perfectly. You can make them work in pairs and show you their guesses with a mini-whiteboard, you can play with two teams and ask one person at a time to try a combination on the board, or you can ask them to play together as one team and use a stopwatch to calculate the time they need to figure it out; for example. As long as you know that they have seen the majority of the words on each table, it should be fine.

So I will add here a few of the Connections I created to practise Spanish, divided by level. All of them include red herrings, which is my favourite part of the game. (I am sorry for giving out the answers down here but there was no other way for you to know which ones to choose otherwise.)

Year 7 (11-12 years old):

Connections 001: Greetings, Adjectives, Weather and Activities in first person.

Connections 002: Colours, Connectives, Pets and Fruits.

Connections 003: Days of the Week, Months and Adjectives.

Year 8 (12-13 years old):

Connections 001: Numbers, Weather, Time phrases and Activities in third person.

Connections 002: Comparisons, Time, Stem-changing verbs and Sequencers.

Connections 003: Verbs, Cognates and Opinions.

GCSE (14-16 years old):

Connections 001: Connectives, Prepositions and Pronouns.

Connections 002: Verbs and Time phrases.

Connections 003: Verbs, Food and Transports.


I will keep this post updated with new additions.

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