Category Archives: Games

Teachers being taught!

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I’m still at the high school. I can’t complain. It has been my own decision and nobody said it was going to be an easy path to walk . Teaching highly motivated adults is very easy, there is no argument here! But teens, oh my goodness!
Lack of motivation in some rural areas has been an ongoing problem for some time and this big crisis is not helping much.

On the other hand, I find it really challenging to find new ways to motivate my unmotivated and/or under motivated students. That’s why when I suggested they try and be teachers for one day designing some strategies to revise the grammar for the Present Tense and two of my students showed a tiny bit of enthusiasm I readily encouraged them. Sadly, one of them didn’t come up to my expectations, so it’s not worth mentioning but one of my students ,Eva, did really well. She revised the present tense, she wrote some exercises for her classmates to practise and she even made us play TIC TAC TOE, which we had been using for Frequency Adverbs and Interrogative Pronouns. This is a picture of Eva below. Well done, Eva ! Teaching is in your genes!


 

Warmers , Fillers and Coolers

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Welcome back to my blog! How quickly time flies! Tomorrow I’ll be heading back  to the classroom and I’m sure you will be too.

On the first day, it is not always easy to get started. I’m never in the mood to start teaching straight away as some students have not bought their textbooks yet, you have some information to give, some forms to be filled ..etc, so I usually end up having less than half an hour to  get  them  into the right mood for learning. That’s why I am considering using some of these activities  from Online ESL Activities to help my students get rid of the dust accumulated during the summer holidays  and give their English some brushing up.

For elementary students:

3-6-9
This is a very popular Korean game. Students take turns to say numbers in order. The first student says, “1”, the second student says “2”, etc. Every time the digits 3, 6, or 9 appear, the student must clap once for each digit, not say the number.
So with the number “3”, the student must clap , not say “three!”. With the number “30”, the students must also clap once, and with the number “39” students must clap twice, because there are two instances of the digits 3, 6, and 9.
If a student says a wrong number, claps at the wrong time, or says a number instead of clapping, they are out. Last person in the game wins.

As a variation, you can also include other rules for different numbers. For example, with multiples of 5, eg. 5, 10, 15, 20, etc. students must shout “A-Ja!”.

Alphabet Tic-Tac-Toe
Draw a 3×3 grid on the board. In each square of the grid, write a letter. Put the students into 2-4 teams. Each team selects a square, and must think of ten words beginning with the letter in the sqaure. Give them a time limit, for example 1 minute. If they get 10 correct words, that team gets the square. The first with 3 in a row wins the game. With more teams use a 4×4 grid, teams have to get 3 or 4-in-a-row. Good for younger learners.

For intermediate classes:

Family Fortunes
Based on a popular British TV show. Put the students into two teams. The teacher should then think of a topic, and secretly write down 5 words connected with that topic. Teams take turns to guess the five words the teacher thought of.

For example, give the students the topic “Things you make spaghetti with”. Then jot down 5 connected words, eg. pasta, tomato, sauce, meat, herbs. The students in the first team take turns to guess the 5 words. If they guess them all correctly, they win. Otherwise the next team gets a chance. If both teams can’ t guess all 5 items, the team with the most correct guesses wins



Password
Split the class into teams. One student from each team comes to the front and faces away from the board. The teacher writes a word on the board. The teams must give definitions to the team member at the front of the class. The first student to guess the word wins a point for their team.
As a variation, students can also be given three words which they cannot use in their definitions. For example, to define the word “rabbit”, you could disallow the words “ears”, “jump” and “carrot”.

Scattegories
Write a few categories on the board, eg. clothing, food, country, etc. Put the students into teams. The teacher gives a letter to a team and the students have to think of a word (or several words) starting with the given letter for each category. For example, imagine a class is using the example categories above and the letter “s”. Correct answers would include “shirt”, “salad”, and “Spain”. If a team gives a word for each category in under a minute, they get a point. The team with the most points wins

 

Spelling Bee
A student must start by saying a letter, eg. “d”. The next student must say another letter, eg. “a”. This student should know a word that starts with “da”. The next student says another letter, eg. “t”, and this student must know of a word that starts with “dat”. The next student says another letter, and so on.
Students may add letters even if they can’t think of a word, but this is dangerous. Every student, on their turn, can challenge the previous student about their spelling. If the previous student knows a word that uses all the letters given, the challenging student is out. If the previous student does not know a word, then the challenged student is out. Game continues until there is just one student left.

 

Spelling Revision with Spelling City

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We are almost on holidays and students are beginning to feel the heavy burden of passing all their exams. It’s never too late to start studying, is it?

English spelling is difficult. There is no point in pretending otherwise but… nevertheless, students have to learn to spell so let’s choose a motivating activity to speed up their learning.
I plan to take my students to the computers room and use the excellent website Vocabulary and Spelling City.com.

Aim: to revise the spelling of words and practise their pronunciation.

Procedure:
♥Assign a computer to every student (or alternatively to every two students)
♥Tell them they are going to help their classmates revise the spelling of some of the words studied in this course. Decide on the numbers of words you want to revise and ask students to go to the website Vocabulary and Spelling City.com
♥Students type the words in the spaces provided and click on the button Spelling Test. .See pictures below.
♥Ask students to stand up and choose a different computer. Students click on Say It and Sentence to guess the hidden word and type it. Click Check me to see your score and then there is the possibility of clicking on the button Teach me where the word will be spelled.
♥You can ask them to repeat the procedure and revise new words. They will surely love it.

If you want to read a bit more about English Spelling, click here

You might also want to read:

Human Bingo to Revise Irregular Verbs

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I got this wonderful idea from Mel Wawen although I have slightly modified it. As she explains, it can be used as a warm up before the lesson or at the end of it when students feel they have had enough of English,

This time I needed to revise Irregular Verbs and this is how I did it.

  • I asked students to tidily sit individually and in rows of three or four.
  • Then, I asked each of them to choose an irregular verb from the ones we had studied. I told them to write it down in its irregular past form on a piece of paper.
  • Every row is a team, so they should make sure every student in the same team has chosen a different irregular verb.
  • Tell them you are going to say a verb at a time, using the infinitive form. When the students hear the infinitive for the irregular they have chosen, they must say the irregular past form aloud and then sit down.
  • The first team with all the students sitting down wins the game.

Follow up:

I used this game when they first learned there was something called irregular verbs. It was funny and it only took about three or four minutes.

The second time I played this human bingo, students also had to write a sentence containing the irregular verb. After checking that their sentence was grammatically correct, I made sure they knew how to pronounce in wors in their sentences.

It was their turn now. They had to stand up and read aloud their sentence but without saying the verb. Students in the class had to provide the right verb in the past to fill in the gap.

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Treasure Hunt: a funny way to revise

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I’ve been using this idea for quite a long time but though I can remember it was a word of  mouth idea I can’t quite say who it came from, so forgive me if you’re reading this and I haven’t given you any credit.

I’ve tried this game in the EOI with adults and now I have just tried it with teens and I can say it works very well with both, the only difference being that teens are probably “a bit” noisier .

How to revise: this game requires some preparation. You need to decide beforehand if you are going to revise the whole book or one or two units. Then, you have to write some questions (see my own game for ideas here) with content from the units you want to revise and produce a worksheet.

♥In class, ask students to sit in pairs or threes and give each pair just one photocopy. You don’t want everybody in the group to have a photocopy in case they feel tempted to cheat.

♥ Tell them they can use their textbooks, workbooks and notebooks (they’re going to love you).

♥ Explain that the aim of the game is to revise, so they will have to be able to give the right answer to each of the questions in the worksheet.

♥ They can only answer one question at a time and they can only start question 2 when they have answered correctly question number 1.

♥ So students in pairs or in threes answer question number 1 and then they rush up to your table. If you put a tick, it means it is correct and they can proceed to question number 2. Othewise, they have to go back to their group and try again.

♥ The winner is the pair who finishes first, obviously! I don’t normally take sweets to the classroom, so I give them a Free Homework Pass, which they normally kill to get. I download it from here.