Remember Memory?

This week I was thinking about how I could "liven up" my language learning.  In many of my classes, I point to an object, ask what it is, and my language helper says the name.  This gets tiring after a few days--let alone months or years of study!  I realized I needed a change of pace.  I started thinking about when I was little, and what we do with little kids when they are learning English.  I remembered the game "Memory"!  Do you remember it?  I remember playing it, and memorizing which card had the corner torn, or which card was folded and was creased--had to find someway to remember the cards!  So this week I made my own "Memory" game.  I took 14 nouns, drew them twice, colored them, and pasted them on cardstock.  Now my teachers and roommates get to play Memory with me! :-)  The picture is the first night the game was ready: Nazareth and Silvia played a half deck with me.  The rules in this Memory game require me to speak the nouns each time the card is turned over, then to say whether or not they cards are the same.  This gets me saying the gender of the noun (nouns have gender in Spanish) and pluralizing them when they are the same.  This is a great activity.  Any other ideas out there for ways to liven up language learning?