Tag Archives: games

A Guess the Word Game to Practise Relative Sentences and Paraphrasing

Create your own stuff, Funny Stuff, Games, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Slides, Speaking, Students' Corner, Vocabulary, Vocabulary Games, , , , , ,

What do you normally do when you are talking to a person in English and you don’t know the word? I guess you don’t tell the person ” OK, right, hold on! I am going to look it up on my mobile phone”. You might be tempted to do it, but know that the person you are talking to might lose interest in what you are saying.
So, the thing to do would be Paraphrasing.

How do we paraphrase?? There are some expressions you can use
It’s A KIND OF house
It’s THE OPPOSITE OF lazy
It’s LIKE cleaning but… trying to explain what you want to say but using other words you know. That’s calle
It’s SIMILAR TO book but..
FOR EXAMPLE, you do this when
It’s A SYNONYM OF..
It’s A PERSON/SOMEBODY WHO…
It’s a THING/SOMETHING WHICH…
It’s SOMEWHERE/A PLACE WHERE

It can also help to say “ It’s a noun, or an adjective…. “ If it’s an expression, you can also say “ It’s an expression and there are three words in it”

Right, now we are ready to play the game. It’s called WHAT’S THE WORD?

How we play the game:

  • Divide the class into two teams
  • Ask a member of Team A to sit on chair with his back to the whiteboard.
  • Display the first word on the screen
  • The members of the team have two minutes to describe the word but they cannot use any parts of the words on the screen. For example if it is “teacher” they cannot use the word “teach”.The aim is for the student to guess as many words as possible in one minute. Every word in black scores one point , the ones in red score two points.
  • Then, it is the other team’s turn to choose someone to take the hot seat.
  • Needless to say, you keep the score on the board for everybody to see. Have fun!!!

 

Reading Comprehension: Pre-Teaching Vocabulary

General, Reading, Vocabulary, Vocabulary Games, , ,

All my lessons last 90 minutes and even though I like to think that students don’t normally get tired or bored, changing gears several times during the 90 minutes is quite important to maintain their level of attention. In this sense, fortunately, teaching a language is not the same as teaching some other subjects where the range of activities you can do is a bit more restricted.
When it comes to Reading Comprehension there are some activities I have tried over the years that seem to have worked pretty well. This week I am planning to use a different activity with my intermediate groups to pre -teach the vocabulary in the Reading Activity, which I would like to share with you. It will require that they leave their seats and walk around the class, talking to their classmates. I’m sure they will appreciate the opportunity to move their legs.
Steps.
Step 1. Decide the vocabulary you want to teach (that goes without saying, doesn’t it?)
Step 2. Prepare two sets of cards. One card contains the word and part of speech you want to teach and the other card contains the definition.
Step 3. Students stand up and find their partner ( I have large groups so it’s going to take a while).
Step 4. Students sit down with their partner and write a sentence containing their word.
Step 5. Students read their sentences and explain the meaning of the word /expression being studied.
Note: I have very large groups, like  thirty students  per class but I never know how many  will be attending on a particular day. For this kind of activities I need to make sure I have cards for all the students. So, if I run out of words to pre-teach, I’ll prepare some cards containing the phonetics for the targeted words.

Thanks for reading!

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Learning the Alphabet

A word on Grammar, American Cultural aspects, Audio, Funny Stuff, Games, General, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, , ,

Sometimes I can write three posts in a row; I feel everything I want to convey flows naturally and… some other times I’m at a loss for words. I know what I want to say but I don’t seem to find the right words. I write and cross off, write and cross off and the whole process is repeated all over again until I find myself wondering what the point of writing a lengthy introduction is when I can never be sure if there is anybody out there reading it. And then, this week three teachers from different parts of the world kindly wrote a line to let me know they are on the other side, and paying attention. Thank you, you cannot begin to imagine how motivating your words have been.

Learning the Alphabet is fun but even in Advanced Levels vowels still pose a problem, especially for Spanish students – our “i” /i/ is the English “e”, the English “i” is pronounced /ai/ and our “a” is pronounced /ei/. The letters “g” and “j” are also difficult and students find it difficult to hear the difference between “b” and “v”. That’s why it is important to dedicate some meaningful time to learning something so useful in everyday’s life.

These are the two activities I’m going to use this year to teach/revise the alphabet.

♥The first one is a video. I have found that adults still enjoy- or shall I dare say more than enjoy- clips aimed at little children. If you are an adult, watch the following clip to revise the alphabet and tell me what you think. You might need to remind students of a traditional nursery rhyme that goes like this

Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full!
One for the master, one for the dame,

before playing the video.

♥The second activity is nothing to write home about. It is the world famous Hangman, but this year, played in groups and instead of displaying words, I’m going to try a short sentence:

Divide the class into two teams. You’ll need a red pen for Group A and a black pen for Group B ( or any different colour 😉 ). On the board write the gaps for two different words of any length ( or a short sentence). Group A and B take it in turns to choose one letter of the alphabet. If the letter is correct, fill in the gap (in red if it’s A’s turn and in black if it is B’s). If the letter is not contained in the selected words, start drawing portions of the hangman (remember red or black). The game continues until all the letters have been guessed or all the parts of the hangman are drawn. If groups manage to guess the words, count the number of red or black letters to announce who the winner is.

You might also want to have a look at what I did to teach the alphabet three years ago. Click here

First Day : getting to know my students

Games, Speaking, , , ,

I’ve been teaching for a long, loooong time and one might expect I don’t have to suffer from first-class stress . But I’ve come to terms with myself and admitted  that no matter how long I’ve been in the business, it is always going  to feel like  having a bull ( past the butterfly feeling) in my stomach. So again, I’m hunting books ,posts, and the Internet for ideas to use on the first day  to get to know my students and to give them the first chance to use the language. These are the ones I’m considering  – in case you want to use them.

By the way, these are the ones I used last year if you want to have a look https://www.cristinacabal.com/?p=2694

♥Interviewing your partner: Tell students they are going to interview four or five people they don’t know in the class. Ask them to write three or four questions to ask these people. Once it is done, students get up and walk around the classroom.

♥Get to Know you Bingo: this one requires a bit of preparation but it’s not like you are already loaded with exams, is it? Let’s play bingo, then! Now, the first thing you need to do is prepare a bingo sheet with some questions ( a grid of  4×4 , for example). Make sure students know how to play bingo- this is quite  important, as you can guess. Students get up and walk around asking questions to everybody in the class but they have to have a different name for each grid. So if a student asks a question to a student and this student says “yes”, he should write the name of that student in the grid and move on; if the student says “no”, he can then ask this same student a new question. The first person to get a line down or across shouts “LINE” and the first person to fill in all the boxes with a name shouts  BINGO.

I would , of course, encourage follow-up questions  when checking,  with  the students providing the questions- of course.

♥Who Am I..? I love this game to introduce myself to my students. It is played in teams and there is a winner. If you have been reading me for some time you know I am very competitive; that must be the reason why I am definitely going to use this one this year. The game was written by Paul Adams  and here is the link

♥Five Questions. Divide the class in five groups and ask each group to write a question they would like to ask you. In turns, one member of each group comes up to the board and writes the question. The students decide if the question is correct in terms of tenses, spelling …etc. Finally, the student asks the question. Before you tell them, give the students the chance to guess your answer.

♥Writing Sample – I’m thinking it might be a good idea to use this warm-up after doing some oral practice. The idea is to ask students  to write a bit about themselves  to  get an idea of how advanced they are. Some ideas might be : Why are you learning English and why are you taking this course? or What’s your favourite hobby ?

Hope you can use some of these ideas!!!

Having Fun

Create your own stuff, freeware, Funny Stuff, Grammar and Exercises, , , , , ,

I should be marking exams and then again preparing a new batch of them.Oh my Gosh It is that time of the year!!Instead I am playing with Classtools.net.

One of my students asked me to do some more practise on Reported Speech Questions and I thought this could be a nice way to revise this point of grammar.

Click on the numbers to see the questions ! Don’t you just love it??