Classroom as a Footbal Pitch?

I'd been long struggling with a class of 8-year-olds and I couldn't figure out what to do with two particular boys of whom one is quite smart but very disobedient and the other one just like him, though much slower when it comes to English. I increasingly often resorted to sending one of them out of the classroom. I knew it wasn't ideal as it didn't seem to work.



Luckily, while I was reading a book on teaching children in Asia, I came across this idea that any punishment is essentially wrong because it only makes things worse rather than the opposite. The author went on to suggest that we should try to turn a lesson into a big game where children compete in groups for points and so are stimulated to try hard throughout the lesson while at the same time under the control of their team-mates. This thing would probably seem banal to more experienced teachers, however, I came up with the idea of turning the lesson into a football match where I act as a referee.

Amazingly, what I did had an enormous impact on those boys. They all understand football very well and so I didn't have to explain at lengths what my yellow and red card means!

I need to teach more groupwork.
I need to learn more...